20 Things All Returning Players MUST Do! (Destiny 2)

a lot of people are coming back to Destiny 2 right now so today I'm going to go through a bunch of things that all returning players absolutely need to know about now depending on when you last played there is quite a bit of stuff to cover in fact I'd actually say that the game is completely unrecognizable if you haven't played for the past few years my goal though is that by watching this video you will at least gain a basic understanding of how the game works in the modern day the first thing we should probably get out of the way is the pricing model and what you should buy in order to have the best experience Destiny is a free-to-play game technically speaking but the expansions and the paid experiences are ultimately what you'll want if you are going to be playing this game for any length of time you'll get access to a bunch of Loot and like raids and Dungeons and all of the best content that you wouldn't really be able to access if you were just a free-to-play player but luckily for you as a returning player Bungie has massively overhauled the pricing structure and the monetization of this game and there is now just one bundle that you can buy that includes all of the past expansions together for one price this is known as the destiny 2 Legacy Collection 2024 and it comes out with the final shape so if you want all of the content from the past just get that the one drawback with this though is it doesn't include the dungeons from lightfall and witch Queen so you will need to go get the dungeon key separately if you want those but that's like your lowest priority the first thing you should definitely get is the final shape and then you also should get the Legacy pack just to get all of the past expansions the dungeons are kind of like a nice thing you can add on if you become more of a dedicated player and you've been playing the game for a few months you will also be getting certain dungeons like the grasp of avarest and the shatter and Throne those are included with the Forsaken pack and the 30th Anniversary pack which are all included in the Legacy pack so if you just get the Legacy pack you'll have quite a bit of good stuff and plenty of Dungeons and plenty of content to work through as a side note for the future of the game seasons are done there's no more seasons there is now this new system called episodes that are basically like Seasons but expanded and more interesting so instead of having the Four Seasons per year that we've had in the past we're now going to have three episodes so hopefully that means that they'll get a little bit more attention and they'll be a little bit more expansive than seasons were the episodes can be bought individually or they come with the $100 version of the latest expansion So based on all of that my recommendation is get the latest expansion final shape and then get the Legacy Collection that should include basically everything you will need as a returning player the next thing we should discuss is a Pathfinder system because this is a pretty big gameplay system that replaces a lot of things we've had in the past for example like bounties and patrols are basically being replaced with Pathfinder and if you haven't played since 2017 the the token system is long gone but it is also essentially being replaced with Pathfinder the overall system works as follows you kind of you start out with this map and your goal is to create a direct path from the left to the right and you'll have like six nodes on the left and as you go more and more to the right you stop you start getting like fewer and fewer options so you will be more restricted in the objectives that you can do each node will have a specific objective that you have to complete and they will slight they will get more challenging and you'll also be forced to go to certain ones that you might normally not do so one of the design goals of the Pathfinder was actually to kind of push players a little bit outside of their comfort zone in order to get them to do activities that are along the path towards the end but it's also worth noting that if you really don't want to do an activity like say there's a Gambit node in there you can go around it by creating a longer path and doing more other objectives instead but the ultimate goal is to get from the left to the right and ultimately reach that loot which is located on the right hand side each node is similar to a bounty in that it will have a relatively easy objective for you to complete and will also give you a small amount of rewards so for example it might give you some experience but the main goal is to reach all the way to the right hand side where you can then claim the big loot the big reward at the end once you have reached the end you might want to reset your Pathfinder but the other interesting thing is that at least on the destination Pathfinder you will get more rewards based on how many paths you have completed to the end for example if you complete two paths instead of just one you'll get almost double the loot and as you can see with this table here each additional path that you complete will give you more rewards so you can also reset your Pathfinder once you've completed it all the way to the right with at least one path but the thing is you will actually get less rewards for subsequent completions of the Pathfinder after you've reset it so for example on your first three completions of the ritual Pathfinder you'll get a prime nram enhancement prism 150 bright dust and 25,000 XP but after that for your following seven completions you'll only get an enhancement prism 150 bright dust and 4,000 XP so it's basically replacing the old system for the ritual playlist where you would get a weekly objective that you can complete but in this case it's just like there's a weekly objective you can reset it you can do it three times but but then after that you start getting less and less rewards the other interesting thing is that your path is the same at the beginning of the week but after you reset you get a more randomized path so you will not have the same path as every other player you will not have the same objectives on your reset Pathfinder at the weekly reset though everyone's Pathfinder will reset they'll reset all the rewards you can start earning the highest tiers again but everyone will also have the same objectives again for that first Pathfinder of the week Pathfinder is a really good Improvement because it's kind of similar to bounties but it's just much better in every way for example it's infinitely repeatable you can do it however much you want and it's shared across all three of your characters so you don't have to worry about doing any strange management of your inventory the next topic to discuss is probably the reason why some of you quit the game and that is sun setting and the infamous dcv now good news or bad news depending on how you look at it weapon and armor retirement is now deleted yeah that's no more so all of your weapons from any period in Destiny history are now usable and can get up to the maximum power level so if you have some weapon from vanilla you can technically now use it but the thing is is that it's probably been power crept out of relevance like the new weapons are probably so much better than your old weapon that it's probably not worth using but I say probably because there is a chance that you actually have one particular old weapon that is actually somewhat viable in the current sandbox for example uh my Duke I'm probably going to be pulling out and using in PvP because it has some pretty interesting perk combinations the next good news is that expansion sunsetting and vating has been removed so for example old expansions were removed into the content Vault like for example forsaken no longer exists but now current expansions will no longer be entering the content vault at any time ever so that's good because it really sucked when you would buy an expansion and then a few years later it would just disappear so anyway that's this is kind of old news but if you're a returning player you might not know that they removed expansion sunsetting so thumbs up to that the seasonal SL episodic sunsetting though does exist so all seasonal stuff has been leaving the game once per year and presumably the same might be true for episodes in the future as well next up is Guardian ranks this is a relatively new system and it's basically the ultimate progression and tutorial system that exists within the game so if you're a new Guardian you'll probably start out as a relatively low rank but if you're returning you might have some Guardian rank progress as well depending on what you've completed on your account so basically the guardian ranks will demand that you do certain things in order to progress and these things will start out by being extremely easy so you should have no problem working through them at the beginning you do need to get to like Guardian rank five or six in order to get like the basic stuff in the game um because a lot of stuff will just be locked out to you if you don't have a few Guardian ranks so just make sure you knock those out super easy at the beginning but as you get further as you get like above Guardian rank 7 89 those start becoming a little bit more difficult but you do get more Loadout slots which we'll talk about a little bit later so there is kind of a reason to do them and they're also kind of bragging rights but as long as you have like the basic level six that's basically all you technically need if you don't want to go any further you don't really have to story is an interesting topic that has changed quite a bit over the years and some of it was sunset unfortunately and you can't play it anymore however they did add this new feature called the timeline Reflections up in the right hand corner of your director you can go there to kind of relive parts of the story you can actually go and launch old missions that were removed from the game so you can kind of get like a recap of forsaken even though forsaken is no longer in the game if you want to do that it's totally optional um but they also give like brief summaries so if you missed out on I don't know season 15 you can go you can go in there and get a brief summary of the different events that happened throughout the different expansions in the different seasons I'd also say if you want to understand the modern story of the game it is pretty important to understand like what we've done over the past 10 years so I would highly recommend watching my video covering the entire story of Destiny now it's only 40 minutes long we did we condensed it and made it like really summarized it's not like it's a 5H hour version of this even though we are also making a 5H hour version but if you want a recap if you want it like condensed and summarized as much as possible there's a 40-minute version on my second Channel you can watch that I would highly recommend if you want to understand what is actually going on in final shape and Beyond when it comes to the actual gameplay of these stories there are some new systems for the campaigns that have changed things quite a lot so for example there's now the normal difficulty and the legendary difficulty and the legendary difficulty is quite a bit harder but it is actually quite popular most players even casuals will attempt the legendary difficulty and although it does offer more of a challenge it also offers more interesting rewards so for example ex Le once you reach the very end of the legendary campaign you'll get armor that boosts you pretty significantly up in power level so you can just skip some of the base power leveling process speaking of which now is a good time to talk about leveling and power so as I mentioned you can get a big head start from the power boost of the campaign if you do it on legendary but the next thing you'll want to do is go into your director and search for the powerful loot icons and do those after that the last step is to search for the Pinnacles and do those as a final shape the power floor is 1900 the soft cap is 1940 the powerful cap is 1990 and the Pinnacle SL hard cap is level 2,000 so really you can do whatever you want until you reach the soft cap and then the powerful cap is where you want to do the powerful rewards and then up to the Pinnacle cap is when you're going to want to do your Pinnacle rewards another interesting and great quality of life update is we now have account wide power so instead of having to level up your Hunter and then the next week go onto your Titan and level up your Titan starting from the very bottom by just switching your weapons you can now just get the drops at the level of your main character so whatever your main character is whatever the highest power level on your account is all of your other characters will get power drops at that same level automatically so there's no need to go level up your other characters anymore you can just play them and you will instantly start getting the drops at the highest level that exists on your account another great thing is there is now fire team power which basically means if you are underleveled but someone in your fire team is really high level you will get boosted almost up to their level so that you can go do whatever activity they're wanting to do so for example if you have a friend who's obsessed with this game and he's power level 10 million and you are only power level two you can just join his fire team and you will get almost his power level of 10 million just minus five whoever is the highest power level in a fire team will become the power Leader by default and then everyone will just go five below their power so it's great for people who are playing together and maybe are not the same power level and they can still do relatively difficult activities together even though this system exists though you still kind of need to do your power leveling though because if you want to do something solo you'll obviously not be able to rely on your fire team member and then also five power level below does start to matter quite a bit in endgame content so you'll want to be as high as you possibly can the other thing is that if you are the power leader in your fire team you'll get a commendation bonus so that's kind of nice to have if you are the power leader speaking of commendations these are basically things that you could hand out to your fire team members at the end of an activity and it's basically just saying nice job these were not introduced until relatively recently so you might not know about them they're not super popular I mean people don't love them a lot but basically it's just a way to Pat your teammate on the back and say good job as a quick side note I'd also say you definitely need to get Destiny item manager if this is something you're not familiar with this is basically a website SL extension that is extremely beneficial for you as a destiny player so if you need to move something from one character to the other or grab something from the Vault or even like set up loadouts you can do that all within dim and it's also really good for searching for Stuff unfortunately Destiny really does not have searching at all you can't search your Vault for a certain weapon like you can't type it in but you can type it in on dim um and they also have a bunch of filters and there's tons of really complex features that you can go into depth over there with but overall I would highly recommend dim if it's not something that you already do it's basically required to play the game at any sort of a high level but on the other hand we also do have an in-game Vault now so instead of having to travel to the Tower and load in for 10 years you can now just go to orbit and you can press a certain key whatever it says in the bottom left and open up your Vault you can also actually do this if you are in an activity if you are the fire team leader by opening up your director selecting an activity and then that same little button will appear in the bottom left that tells you what to press to open your Vault so it's pretty cool that you can now actually access Vault from anywhere in the destiny system but it's still slightly limiting because you can't access your other characters so you still kind of need dim for stuff like that the next thing that returning players definitely need to be aware of is the fire team finder because this basically gives you access to an in-game lfg to help you group up with other players and it's extremely handy for literally anything that doesn't have matchmaking or if you just want to play any random activity with another player you can use this for literally whatever you can imagine there's a whole list of banners that you can select for raids or nightfalls or Crucible or trials or whatever you want you can use it and find other people to group up with you can join a call with them or use the in-game voice chat but a lot of them are also just no coms you just join and run the activity almost as if it was using matchmaking if you're getting into any of the more difficult endgame stuff though people do tend to use voice channels or some other form of communication so the the big Destiny 2 lfg Discord is still relatively popular um and you can also join my Discord at discord.gg Shadow Destiny and we do have a lot of people who are constantly playing together and just asking questions and learning about the game in there overall though fire team finder is a great way to meet other players and join other players for various activities and it's a great replacement to the bungie.net version of the fire team finder that we had in the past and by the way that has basically been overhauled and replaced with the actual in-game fire team finder system they're basically just linked together next up is transmog and this can be unlocked with a Quest from a to one in the tower and it's basically centered around earning materials so you can do these bounties there's limited to 10 per class per episode SL season and these bounties can be spent to earn gear to unlock them and then you get them as a universal ornament the bounties are relatively easy but it can be kind of a grind to do so many of them per season but anyway once you get them you are able to spend them and unlock a piece of armor forever so you basically just go into your customization screen you unlock one of these ornaments and now you can apply it to any of your armor for free forever it is kind of over complicated in my opinion but once you get the hang of it you'll love being able to transmog your character and make them look really cool while still wearing your highest stat armor that also has your coolest appearance the one drawback is you cannot transmog your Exotics because bungi wants them to remain recognizable and unique so the only thing you can do for your Exotics I guess is just put on their shaders and their own exotic ornaments but you can't put a legendary piece of armor onto an exotic because that would compromise its identity the next thing is loadouts these are extremely cool and extremely convenient and I am just sad we didn't get these on day one of Destiny 1 because this is like this is such a good feature and it's been extremely popular in the community loadouts basically let you swap from one complete Loadout to another complete Loadout in 0.1 seconds just by clicking one button on the left of your character screen so these will save all of your weapons all of your armor all of your mods your subclasses all your subass customization it even saves your transmog so you can switch from one thing to another super fast super easy super efficiently you can also change the name and the icon and the color of your loadouts on the left so it's kind of to help make them a little bit more recognizable so for example you might have like a a trials Loadout and a normal Crucible Loadout and a Nightfall load out and a I don't know raid Loadout so you can you can have a bunch of different options here and you will unlock more slots for your loadouts as you progress in your guardian ranks the one shortcoming is that your Loadout does not save your artifact perk selections so you will have to actually customize those manually but we will get more into the artifact perks in a little bit if you haven't played in a while they have completely overhauled the way that weapons and weapon slots work so instead of having like double primary or a primary special and a heavy you can now just customize those in basically any order that you want except for your heavy your heavy your heavy option will always remain in the heavy slot but you can now run done two specials in the first two slots or double primaries if you want or one special and one primary or a primary in the first slot and a special in the second slot there's you can do any combination of those that you might want however the one thing I would say is most people would not recommend running double primary in PVE you probably want to have one primary and one special cuz they kind of fulfill different roles in the sandbox your primary is normally there are some exceptions but your primary is normally meant for taking out the ads and your special is normally meant for taking out the slightly more beefy enemies and your heavy is for bosses and extra beefy enemies there are certain like weapons that break those exceptions for example like a forbearance grenade launcher is really good for adclear but for the most part those rules hold true even though the first two slots on your character are not restricted to an ammo type they are restricted to the elements so for example your kinetic slot your top slot will have kinetic stasis and Strand and then in your second slot you will have solar Arc and void weapon crafting is an extremely important system that basically allows you to get the best weapons in the game with the exact perks that you want as you play you'll notice that you get these red border drops so basically they're just normal weapons except they are included with a pattern and these just drop based on RNG so once you get these red border weapons you'll want to head into the inspection screen and extract their patterns or you can also just dismantle them and that will automatically extract the pattern as well once you get a certain number of patterns it's normally five you can then head over to the enclave and start crafting some of the best weapons in the game you get to pick the exact perks that you want so it basically just removes RNG and gives you access to some incredible perfect rolls once you craft a weapon here in The Enclave you'll need to level it up to a certain level and then return to reshape it to unlock all of the perks and also once you get to a certain high level you can also get enhanced versions of the perks which are basically like just slightly better than the normal version of the perks also not every single weapon is craftable so if you don't see it dropping with red borders and if you don't see it list under the patterns in your in in your inventory and in your menu then that weapon is probably not craftable however as of final shape every single weapon that drops will either be craftable or enhanceable so if you get a random roll weapon that is not craftable you'll still be able to enhance the perks on it and get access to those enhanced versions of the perks that I just mentioned if you haven't played since like 2019 then you might not be familiar with finishers these are basically like really good moves that allow you to instantly defeat any low Health enemy and they also have tons of synergy with Exotics and fragments and other perks so finishers can be extremely useful especially in endgame content as for the PVP side of the game we have actually gotten quite a few substantial updates in the past few years so we've had huge iterations and improvements and especially now that we have a PVP Strike Team which is like a dedicated team that's actually working on improving PVP things are surprisingly good nowadays if you're someone who is interested in Trials of Osiris it is now the easiest it has ever been by far to go Flawless um the mercy card will now give you two mercies so you can actually lose twice and still go Flawless even though that isn't actually Flawless but yeah trials has been massively improved and overhauled over the years and it's in a pretty solid state as of now there's also been quite a lot of experimentation with the sandbox and updating the game to feel more interesting and less ability spammy for example we now have a Mode called Hardware where it actually removes all the abilities this is something that certain people have been asking for for years so if you're someone who doesn't like spamming abilities in Crucible you can now go into hardware and just duel with your weapons which is extremely refreshing you don't have to do that though you can just play the normal modes which will all have abilities and coold downs as normal but the good thing is that we're now getting more frequent balance updates like I know in the past we waited literally a year for shadow dive and stasis to get nerfed but nowadays stuff is getting patched and addressed a little bit more rapidly which is great to see if you're someone who doesn't really love PVP but you still want to get the loot from PvP also good news for you uh trial's loot is way more accessible than it has been in the past you don't actually have to go Flawless to get the loot you can just play a few games and you still get rewarded uh same goes for iron banner I mean you don't have to be an incredible PVP player to get access to the iron Banner Loot and lately it's been dropping some pretty incredible loot like Tusk of the boar for example another thing for returning players is the monument to Lost Light in the tower this is basically Legacy stuff that is still available but it was originally sourced from content that was removed from the game so if for example you didn't finish some exotic Quest that was removed from the game you can now just go buy that weapon from the monument in the tower currencies so a lot of currencies have been either reworked or just removed from the game like for example legendary shards are now just gone as a final shape and planetary materials were just removed a long time ago if you go into your inventory or the Vault you'll probably notice that you have a lot of unused destination materials or just old materials or like Quest items from a really long time ago um if it says on them that you can delete them like for example like old mods really don't have a purpose anymore so if it says that you can delete them you probably can just delete them you can also bring certain uh ones to Rahul if they say that you can bring them to Rahul so you can go and exchange them for some currency if you want build crafting is an incredibly important topic in the modern game and over the years it has become more and more of a focus in Destiny so if you're not very familiar with build crafting this is an incredibly important section for you there is now this like nice side menu that allows you to view all of the mods out a glance while doing your builds as well as select different items and make changes to your Loadout the subclass 3.0 system was created and introduced with stasis but over the years they have applied that to all of the other subclasses and elements as well so there's no more of the tree system there's no more of that big flood of icons that we had in Destiny 1 now everything operates based on this system where you can select your super you can select your class item you can select or your class ability you can select your jump you can select everything all at once in this one big system another interesting change that came with this system is grenades being Universal across the classes so everyone now has access to all of the grenades within this system the things called aspects are like the big modifiers the ones that have a big impact and they are unique to your classes and then below the aspects you also have these other things called fragments and they are shared between all of the different classes so everybody's are the same the fragments are important for further expanding your abilities and triggering different verbs like weakening targets or giving restoration or freezing enemies they can also sometimes be used to give limited versions of some of the other class's abilities for example like devour is probably best on warlocks but it can also be used in a limited way for hunters and Titans if they build into it with their fragments continuing on the topic of build crafting armor and armor mods have also been massively overhauled in the past few years so for example like we used to have solar chest plates or like you know a solar element on your armor or void or whatever but it's now just Universal all of the armor is the same and all of the mods can go on to any type of armor there are still certain restrictions like for example your scavenger mod can only go on your boots it can't go on your helmet but other than that you can put any mod wherever you want there's now a much more simplified version of the older systems like Elemental Wells and charge with light there those are basically all just gone and replaced with a new system called armor charge the easiest way to get an armor charge is probably just to pick up an orb of power or an orb of light for those of you who really haven't played in a long time but you can also do some other ways like equipping a finisher mod once you get the armor charge those are basically used to buff certain parts of your build so for example if you want to deal a lot of damage to a boss a surge mod is really popular in PVE because it will buff your damage overall many other mods will just work passively though so you can just kind of equip them and forget about them and they will just passively buff your build for example siphon mods will just give you orbs of power when you get eliminations with a certain element of weapon and by the way Masterworks giving orbs of power is no longer a thing that got removed so siphon mods is now the new way of doing that next up is artifact mods and these are incredibly important and Powerful for basically any type of activity basically you will unlock points to spend on your artifact as you gain experience and then as you choose perks in each column you will slowly begin to unlock the other columns which have progressively more interesting perks the important thing to know about the artifact is that all artifact mods that you unlock are always applied for free and forever the artifact does get removed and replaced at the end of every episode SL season but for the duration of the Season you will have all the perks that you have unlocked all the time these can be really critical for doing things like stunning Champions which are very present in basically all endgame content so for example if you were to unlock the anti-barrier mod for a certain type of weapon that basically becomes essential for dealing with the anti-barrier Champions you can hover over these icons on your character screen to see which type of Champions you are currently equipped to deal with and also when you select an activity you can hover over these icons to see which type of Champions exist within the activity like I mentioned earlier in this video if you've been on a break and you're just jumping back in but you haven't played all of the past seasons and story and expansions you're probably going to be pretty lost as to what is happening in the current story of the game that is why I highly recommend watching this video right here that covers the entire story of Destiny from the very origins of the universe all the way up to the present day thank you so much for watching and I'll catch you in the next one

Channel: Shadow Destiny 3

Views: 84,835

Keywords: destiny 2, destiny, destiny 2 the final shape, the final shape, destiny 2 update, destiny 2 new player, destiny 2 returning player, destiny 2 beginner's guide, beginner's guide, destiny 2 beginner's guide 2024

Id: uc0QrIPyVOc

Length: 27min 19sec (1639 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2024