8 Tips to Make the Most of 2.2.0

An Exotic Infusion Technique

You probably already know that exotics are decrypting up to 335, depending on your Light Level. But you probably haven’t considered this clever trick from OG_Slayer56:

So let’s assume you got an awesome Lord of Wolves at 320, a Techeun Rage with awful perks at 335, and a brand new Havoc Pigeon at 300. You want your Lord of Wolves maxed out, but what about that Havoc Pigeon?

Here’s what you do: First, you infuse your Lord of Wolves into the Havoc Pigeon, taking it up to 320, then you buy a new Lord of Wolves out of the kiosk and infuse your 335 Techeun Rage into that new 280 Lord of Wolves, taking it to max light instantly! Instead of ending up with a 335 Lord of Wolves and a 300 Havoc Pigeon, you just gained yourself 20 extra light on your sword at the cost of a few exotic shards: cha-ching!

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Dismantle your SRL Momentum Gear? Get excited!

If you dismantled your Momentum gear from the SRL Record Book, good news! You can pick it up again from Amanda Holliday at your leisure.

Dismantle your Elder Sigil? Don’t panic!

You may have noticed that you can dismantle your Elder Sigil, the inventory item that tracks your Challenge of the Elders scores. You may even have done it by accident. Don’t panic! You can re-purchase it from Variks any time you like.

Wait! Does that mean you can farm the Challenge rewards multiple times on the same character? Well, when you re-purchase it, it comes with your existing scores for the week already recorded. This is great for the cumulative score, as you won’t have lost your progress, but also means you shouldn’t need to do the challenge more than 3 times on a single character (unless you fall far short of the 30 thousand point mark).

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Challenge of Elders Exotic Farming

While you’ll only need to run the Challenge 3 (or maybe 4) times to complete your Cumulative Score challenge on a given character, there’s nothing stopping you from continuing to play through it in search of legendary and exotic drops. In fact, once you stop going for score, you can just focus your efforts on dropping the bosses as quickly as possible and speedrun through in as little as 12-18 minutes!

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Blighted Chalice Hidden Room

Guywithquestions88 made this week’s Nightfall much more manageable! When you enter the fight with Malok, there are 4 doors in the central area, none of which can be opened by activating your Ghost. You’ll want to quickly run up to each of them though – every door except one causes visual static when you get right up against it. The one with no static effect is the one hiding the safe room.

nightfall hide

Right after Malok summons reinforcements for the first time, a group of thrall may open that door for you and you’ll want to run inside immediately – this is the only way in! The room contains doors that give you a great field of vision throughout the whole area that the fight takes place in and is by far the safest place to operate from. Unfortunately, it seems that you don’t regenerate health while in some parts of the room (you can tell by the visual static), and the doors remain impossible to open from the outside, but as long as at least one person stays in this room they can open the doors for everyone else to run in and out.

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The Nightfall Counts

The Nightfall this week is the new Blighted Chalice strike, which you’re going to need to do anyway since Variks gives you a quest leading up to it. Make sure you visit him and do the first few steps of that quest before playing the Nightfall. This includes the new story mission as well as spending some time killing Taken (I recommend Court of Oryx for that so you can work on farming higher light artifacts from it at the same time). Once you get to the point where you need to play the Blighted Chalice Strike, kill two birds with one stone by taking on the Nightfall. And remember to use the tip above!

Majors and Ultras for Grimoire

Speaking of things that count, this is a huge relief and something many of us have been asking for since early in Year One. For a long time, Major and Ultra enemies have not counted toward Grimoire score, which has made getting kills on enemies such as Ogres and Hydra even harder than it otherwise would have been. Fortunately, Bungie has resolved this issue at long last. If you’re looking to kill ogres, I suggest starting with this week’s Court of Oryx Tier 3 – you can even farm it by just killing the summoned ogres until time runs out. For Hydra kills, just hit up the original Archon Priest strike: It has several, and you can keep wiping around the middle of the strike to get endless Hydra kills. About time!

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Building a Light Snowball in King’s Fall

Finally, with the announcement that max light level gear is now dropping from King’s Fall even though enemy light levels are remaining unchanged, I’m sure you’re eagerly working to get the band back together. You’re probably planning to take your main in first, and then work on your alts later. If you have more than one raid-ready Guardian, revise that plan! 

First, take in your preferred alt – the one you’re most comfortable falling back on. Do the Raid (or at least the Challenge Mode), and then pass your new high light gear to your third Guardian and infuse some gear you won’t miss later to push that Guardian’s light up even higher. Run the raid with that Guardian now (or at least the Challenge Mode), and then pass all of the super high light drops you get from to your main Guardian for Infusion.

Congratulations! By the time you finish the Raid with your Main (or, yes, at least the Challenge Mode) your main character’s light will be darn close to 335!

 

There you have them, 8 tips for getting the most out of the first week of the April Update. Add your own super good advice in the comments below!