Quick Links
- Farm For Resilience Armor
- Clean Out Your Vault
- Complete Your Exotic Collection
- Finish The Season Pass
- Stock Up On Resources
- Unlock All Aspects And Fragments
- Prepare Bounties
- Unlock Crafting Patterns From Each Season
Destiny 2's Lightfall expansion is right around the corner. Massive overhauls and new additions are going to drastically shake up the meta for both PvE and PvP. While we don't know every little change Lightfall will launch with, we know enough to start preparing for next month's expansion.
While most players prepare for a new season about a week ahead of time, expansions are much larger and tend to overhaul core systems, Lightfall being no exception. Preparing for this expansion now will save you a lot of headaches come launch day, and you'll be able to dive into Lightfall's new buildcrafting systems day one. Here are our eight tips on preparing for Destiny 2's Lightfall expansion. Entries are in no particular order.
Farm For Resilience Armor
What About Artifice Armor?
Artifice gear will now grant a fifth mod socket that can equip +3 stat mods. We aren't sure if these mods will drain mod energy on your gear. Unless you care about naturally hitting high tier thresholds on your builds, Artifice gear isn't necessary for any builds.
According to the Buildcrafting Evolved blog Bungie released, it looks like Resilience mods will now cost four points starting in Lightfall. This makes Resilience just as expensive to spec for as Recovery. If you want to min-max your builds at the start of Lightfall, it's a good idea to farm for some high-stat armor with high Resilience spikes. Crucible players might want Resilience/Intellect gear for maximum armor mod efficiency, while PvE players will prefer Resilience/Discipline gear for faster grenade cooldowns.
As for farming high-stat armor, we cover all good sources in our high-stat armor farming guide. If you're short on time, here's what we recommend:
- Pit of Heresy (Pinnacle Only): When Pit of Heresy is the weekly Pinnacle dungeon, killing Zulmak will always drop high-stat armor with spikey distributions. Use a Ghost mod that biases Resilience on your armor drops.
- Umbral Focusing: Seasonal armor focusing options at the H.E.L.M. drop armor with 60+ stat totals with a chance of spikey distributions. We recommend the focusing options from Haunted and Seraph.
- Master Raids: Raids on Master difficulty force armor to drop with certain stat biases. Farm the raid whenever it drops stats you care about.
- For breakdowns on stat pools and armor in general, check out our Armor 2.0 guide.
Clean Out Your Vault
You've likely heard this multiple times by now, but it's important you clean out your Vault of duplicate weapons, unused armor pieces, and all blue-quality gear. You'd be surprised just how quickly those 600 Vault spaces fill up throughout a season. Try to half the number of slots your Vault is taking up whenever you clean it. For example, if you have 500 slots filled, try to aim for 250 slots when you're done. That's easier said than done, so here are a few tips to make things a little easier.
Deleting Armor
Armor is arguably the easiest thing you can purge from your Vault. Boot up D2ArmorPicker and create some builds, then delete all non-Exotic armor you aren't using. Unused armor pieces will just collect dust in your Vault unless you frequently create builds. Don't feel bad about deleting armor, as it's never been easier getting high-stat armor in Destiny 2. See our high-stat armor guide for tips on good armor sources. For Exotics, we recommend you keep no more than two copies of any Exotic armor piece.
Deleting Weapons
Getting rid of weapons can be difficult. Start by deleting duplicates. Look for weapon rolls that interest you or are something you'll actively use. If you haven't used something in two seasons, it's generally safe to delete. Exceptions exist if the gun has sentimental value to you or is required for testing something. Some players also keep weapons in case of future balance changes. Unless those balance changes are confirmed, don't do this. If a certain weapon archetype becomes meta overnight, it's likely farmable right now or will be in the near future.
Don't let FOMO get a hold on you. When Swords made a PvE comeback in Season of Arrivals, we got Lament a season later. When Rocket Launchers got buffs around Season of the Chosen, we got Code Duello that season, Hezen Vengeance in Splicer, and Hothead in Lost. This goes for PvP too. Remember when 120 Hand Cannons ran rampant in Beyond Light? We got Igneous Hammer and Bottom Dollar a season later. You missed farming for Palindrome? We now have Exalted Truth, Rose, and Austringer. Even if you can predict an incoming meta, you cannot predict what weapons will be released by Bungie. Don't keep guns for theoretical balance changes. Keep guns you're actually going to use.
Complete Your Exotic Collection
Buildcrafting is about to become a core part of Destiny 2 when the Lightfall expansion launches. Armor mods, Strand, and balance changes are going to shake up the buildcrafting metagame significantly. To make sure you're fully prepared for the upcoming changes, obtain all Exotics for your characters. You'll want to focus on Exotic armor mostly, although it's not a bad idea to chase any weapons you don't currently own.
Your best source of Exotic armor is Legendary Lost Sectors. Each day one Lost Sector is chosen to have a Legend and Master version. Beat the Lost Sector by yourself for a small chance of an Exotic armor piece. As for weapons, we recommend completing your Exotic Kiosk and any unfinished Exotic quests. Get your hands on Exotic Ciphers and Ascendant Shards to buy any Kiosk Exotics you're missing.
Finish The Season Pass
Now is the perfect time to get your Season Pass to rank 100 if you haven't already done so. The best source of XP is Seasonal Challenges, found in the "Season 19" and "Quest" tabs in the Director screen. We have a full breakdown of each Seasonal Challenge you can find on our Witch Queen hub page. The Season Pass will help ensure you are stocked up on materials for Lightfall.
If you're someone who finished past Season Passes but never claimed the rewards, you can visit bungie.net to claim last season's Season Pass rewards. If you want to claim Season Pass rewards before this point, you can install the Season Pass Pass extension for Mozilla Firefox. This web browser extension allows you to cycle between each season as far back as Season of Undying, claiming any unlocked rewards on all three of your characters. Bear in mind that you can't level any of these past Season Passes; you can only claim rewards you previously unlocked.
Stock Up On Resources
The time for buildcrafting is nigh. You're going to want to stock up on Upgrade Modules and Masterwork materials before Lightfall launches, more so than previous expansions. Nearly every armor mod is getting rebalanced this expansion, with Combat Style mods getting folded into general armor sockets. Your build likely won't work when Lightfall launches, so have some Masterwork materials on standby.
Upgrade Modules can be obtained from the Season Pass, purchased from Banshee-44, or earned by completing the Witch Queen Legendary campaign (once per character). As for Masterwork materials, there are far too many sources to list off here. You'll generally want to farm Master or Grandmaster Nightfalls to get your hands on Enhancement Prisms and Ascendant Shards. For in-depth breakdowns on Masterwork material drop sources, consult the following guides:
- How To Get Enhancement Cores
- How To Get Enhancement Prisms
- How To Get Ascendant Shards
Unlock All Aspects And Fragments
All subclasses use the Aspects and Fragments system that originally shipped with Stasis in the Beyond Light expansion. Unlocking all of these options can be a tedious process, especially if you're new. We recommend unlocking all Light 3.0 options first before you work on Stasis. All Light 3.0 upgrades can be purchased from Ikora Rey at the Tower, costing a sizable chunk of Glimmer per unlock. Grenades, Aspects, and Fragments must all be purchased from her.
Stasis unlocks are quite tedious and equally boring. You'll need to complete multiple quests and weekly bounties from the Exo Stranger to unlock everything Stasis has to offer. Excluding Fragments, each unlock is per character. We cover how to unlock all Aspects in our Stasis Aspects guide, but we should warn you that these quests are quite repetitive. But if there's any good time to get these finished, it's right now.
Prepare Bounties
The seasonal Artifact is getting some changes in Lightfall. Instead of unlocking powerful mods you socket into your armor, the Artifact now unlocks passive perks that remain active throughout the season. That change has made the Artifact much more important than it's ever been in Destiny 2, and you'll want to have those perks active as soon as possible.
To that end, we recommend completing weekly bounties on each of your characters. Most vendors have two weekly bounties that give XP++ (50,000 XP) as a reward. You'll want to grab these bounties, complete them, and hold onto them; don't turn in these bounties. You have 63 slots shared between quests and bounties. Complete all of your quests and start building up your bounty stockpile on each character. When Lightfall is a week away, start filling your remaining space with XP+ daily bounties. Reddit user u/BYF9 has a great post that goes into detail on how to bounty prep for an upcoming expansion and weekly bounty sources that are mostly accurate—Iron Banner no longer has bounties and Dreaming City weeklies now give XP++. It's a year old but still relevant for Lightfall.
Unlock Crafting Patterns From Each Season
As of writing, Lightfall launches in roughly five weeks. You have enough time to fully complete a crafting pattern from each season, not including red border weapon drops from seasonal content. Seeing as most seasonal weapons need five red border variants to craft, now is the time to start unlocking crafting patterns you care about.
Here's what we recommend you focus on for each season (pick what interests you):
- Risen: Thoughtless, Under Your Skin, Explosive Personality
- These only take three blueprints to craft, so it's possible to earn two if you're lucky.
- Haunted: CALUS Mini-Tool, Austringer
- Plunder: Tarnished Mettle, Brigand's Law
- Seraph: IKELOS_SMG_v1.0.3, Retrofit Escapade, Fire and Forget
- We recommend the IKELOS SMG. The other two picks can drop from Heist Battlegrounds.
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