Destiny 2: How To Prepare For The Final Shape Expansion

The Light and Darkness saga is coming to a close with the upcoming Final Shape expansion for Destiny 2. Facing the Witness and the Dread will require your Guardians to be as prepared as possible. Fortunately, there's enough time to get caught up on any weapons or items you've missed this year.

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In this guide, we'll be covering eight useful tips for getting your account ready for The Final Shape. We'll cover everything from cleaning your Vault to recommending weapons you should farm from the Onslaught playlist and Riven's Wishes quest chain. Use the table of contents above to jump to any specific section that interests you.

Clean Your Vault

The Final Shape will increase everyone's Vault size by 100 items, but that won't be enough to keep a stockpile of good Exotic class items and world drops within the Pale Heart of the Traveler. If you want to keep every new weapon in Final Shape, try to get your Vault down to 400 items or fewer.

Cleaning out your Vault can be tedious or even difficult if you've been playing for a long time, so here are some strategies you can use to quickly free up some space:

Bungie is removing Power limits on sunset gear in Final Shape. Keep weapons with unique traits or exclusive perk combinations.

• Sunset Gear: Delete any Pinnacle weapons you own. You can rebuild them in the Collections tab.
• Weapons: If you have multiple copies of a weapon, delete half of your current rolls. If it's craftable, unlock the crafting pattern first, then delete all of your rolls.
• Weapons: Delete any weapons with the following perks: Adaptive Munitions, Underdog, Full Auto Trigger System, Shield Disorient, Invisible Hand, and Air Assault.
  • All of these perks have been powercrept or no longer serve a purpose.
• Armor: If you have a ton of armor, delete everything with a stat total of less than 60. For hardcore players, use 64 instead.
  • If you need even more space, delete any armor with more than +4 Intellect (PvE only) or +4 Mobility (Warlock/Titans only).
• Exotics: Only keep Exotic weapons you actively use. Follow the previous rule for deleting Exotic armor.

Bounty Prep

If you're planning to attempt the Final Shape raid on Contest Mode, you'll want to prepare bounties to get your Artifact leveled as soon as possible. In essence, you'll want to save as many completed weekly bounties as possible on all three characters; do not turn them in. Destination and certain vendor bounties will carry over between expansions, and turning them in will give you a jump start on the XP grind.

Bounty XP payouts go something like this:

• Weekly Bounty: 12,000 XP
• Daily Bounty: 6,000 XP
• Repeatable Bounty: 3,000 XP

You may hold up to 63 bounties and quests per character. We suggest completing as many quests as possible and then stocking up on bounties to prepare for the Final Shape. If you can hold 55-60 bounties per character, you should be able to reach Level 20+ on the first day. You can easily track your total bounty XP on Destiny Recipes.

As for weekly bounties, you'll want to do bounties on the Dreaming City, Moon, Europa, the Cosmodrome, Neomuna, Xur's Treasure Hoard, and Hawthorne's clan bounties. Fill your remaining slots with daily bounties from destination vendors and Banshee-44.

Do not use bounties from Zavala, Shaxx, or the Drifter. Those bounties are being removed when The Final Shape releases.

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Create Loadouts

Most expansions put a great deal of strain on the Destiny API, so don't expect to use Destiny Item Manager and similar apps during the first day of the expansion. We highly recommend you create loadouts of your favorite builds before The Final Shape comes out. This will let you quickly switch builds or pull items from your Vault at a moment's notice.

You can create a loadout by selecting the loadout tab on the left-hand part of the character menu. You get six loadout slots by default, which is increased to ten if you increase your Guardian Rank. Save a loadout for each subclass you frequently use. If you're looking for ideas, check out our class builds below:

• Hunter Builds
• Titan Builds
• Warlock Builds

Create Alternate Characters

Now is the best time to gear up your alternate characters in Destiny 2. You can use the Gift of the Thunder Gods chest in the Hall of Champions to instantly hit the Power cap of 1,810. This lets you completely bypass the Power grind on alternate characters, allowing you to focus on unlocking Exotics and subclass features.

The Final Shape is adding account-wide Power to the game, meaning that all Powerful Gear drops will be calculated based on your highest-level character, not your item slot. This will make leveling three different characters significantly easier. Creating alternate characters now is a fantastic idea, and you have plenty of time to get them geared.

Unlock Every Subclass Fragment

Outside of chasing god rolls, one of the grindiest parts of Destiny 2 is unlocking all of your subclass Fragments. Since The Final Shape won't be out until June, you have some time to unlock every subclass Fragment on all of your characters. Most subclasses—Arc, Solar, Void, and Stasis—only require Glimmer to purchase each Fragment. This can get quite expensive if you're doing this for three classes, but you only need to do this once.

Strand is a whole other ball game. You'll need to earn Strand Meditations by defeating enemies on Neomuna or by landing final blows with Strand damage. You'll need over a thousand Strand Meditations to get these Fragments unlocked for each character, so now is the time to start farming. We cover how to get Strand Meditations quickly in our Strand subclass guide. For every other subclass, check out our Glimmer guide.

Farm Brave Weapons

The Into the Light update for Destiny 2 brought back 12 fan-favorite weapons with new perk pools, all of which are incredibly strong. New Lights and returning players should farm the Onslaught playlist to get their hands on some S-tier weapons. Here are some of our recommendations:

• Edge Transit: Envious Assassin + Bait and Switch is amazing for boss DPS, rivaling Rocket Launchers buffed by Gjallarhorn .
  • This is our first recommendation if you don't own a crafted Apex Predator.
• Forbearance: Demolitionist + Chain Reaction is the ultimate add clear Special weapon. It also allows any build to spam grenades.
• Midnight Coup: Firefly + One for All makes for a fantastic workhorse Hand Cannon.
• Elsie's Rifle: Zen Moment + Headseeker makes this the best PvP Pulse Rifle in the game.

If you'd like to see our perk recommendations on all 12 of the Brave weapons, check out our Into the Light god roll guide.

Complete Riven's Wishes

Similar to the Brave weapons, you can earn some powerful weapons by completing Riven's Wishes. This is a quest chain that you can start upon completing the Season of the Wish questline. Mara Sov has six quests she will ask you to complete, most of which require you to play Dreaming City content.

Each quest you complete will award one Wish Token. You can redeem these tokens at Mara Sov to acquire Last Wish red borders, any Exotic armor piece from Lightfall, and Masterwork materials. If you're a new or returning player, we suggest you spend your tokens onApex Predator. This is the best Rocket Launcher in the game currently. Spend your remaining tokens on Exotic armor or Exotic Ciphers.

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Stock Up On Masterwork Materials

New expansions always come with Exotic armor pieces and new items to chase. You'll want to have a stockpile of Masterwork materials ready to go if you want to upgrade any of these new items, particularly Prismatic's unique Exotic class items. We recommend farming Grandmaster Nightfalls and The Coil while they're still available.

GM Nightfalls are the single best source of Ascendant Shards in the game. It's also a great place to get high-stat Exotic armor. If you need Ascendant Alloys, farm The Coil. A full Platinum clear will give you multiple Alloys and some other upgrade materials. You'll want to bring at least three Ascendant Shards and two Alloys into this expansion, arguably more if you play multiple characters or enjoy buildcrafting.

Convert Your Legendary Shards

Legendary Shards are going away in Final Shape. All of your Legendary Shards will be deprecated and will not be converted into anything. At least, Bungie isn't going to convert them into anything useful. That's where material exchange comes in. Before the expansion launches, we highly recommend you spend all of your Legendary Shards on materials.

More specifically, we recommend you convert your Legendary Shards into Phantasmal Fragments, a currency purchased from the Lectern of Enchantment on the Moon. You can exchange this material for Glimmer at Rahool, allowing you to convert all of your Legendary Shards into a backup Glimmer currency.

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