To draw up a guide on how to best start your experience with the latest expansion of Destiny 2, The Eclipse, an important premise is necessary: if you are new players who, through friendships or thanks to the trailers, are thinking of starting your experience in the Bungie shooter, DO NOT start with The Eclipse, started by the Queen of Whispers. The campaign of Destiny's latest expansion is a lot of fun to play but has one of the most disappointing and dark narratives in recent years, so don't start there if you're looking for a truly complete experience.
The Eclipse introduces the great antagonist of the Destiny universe, the witness, but his summary videos explain the background very poorly to those who have never come across the saga of Light and Darkness. The Queen of Whispers, however, was the expansion that introduced this character, explaining her origins and motivations. Once that experience is over, you will also have enough equipment and currencies to face The Eclipse on higher difficulty, accelerating your growth process to complete the most difficult activities in the game: the raids.
If, however, you have already dealt with the spatial magic of the former Halo developers, and you have already faced Savathun, the Queen of Whispers, then in this guide to Destiny 2: The Eclipse you will find everything you need to make your experience with the latest Destiny 2 expansion as memorable as possible; all strictly without spoilers.
Legend or not legend?
The first choice that the game will put before you once the introductory films are finished is whether or not you want to face the campaign Legend difficulty. This is one of the key terms of The Eclipse because it means that you are about to begin a more arduous experience that will test your skills. At this difficulty the enemies will be tougher, take less damage and be more aggressive but if you manage to complete it you will receive a whole set of high-level equipment, exotic armor and upgrades for the new subclass.
The most important thing is not to be scared by the game's warnings: not only that the difficulty is always adjustable, so if the challenge gets too intense you can always lower it, but, above all, no one is running after you. If you are reading this guide it means that you are not hardened veterans who are preparing for the race to the world record of the new raid so the most important advice we can give you is to enjoy the experience. The cyberpunk city of Neomuna on Neptune is one of the most innovative and fun environments to explore in recent times, and the big '80s action movie battles are some of the most eventful moments in Destiny's history.
At the level of weaponry we recommend a rapid-fire machine gun, preferably a solar one, a rocket launcher to inflict a lot of damage in a few seconds and a special grenade launcher (the ones with green ammunition) preferably with blinding grenades. As class we suggest the solar one if you have trouble staying alive or the arc one if you find you're not doing enough damage.
Experiment with the equipment that works for you, not what it says online, because if it forces you to distort your game then it's not worth using. Like everything in Destiny, everything is more fun if done with friends but this choice is purely linked to the entertainment factor because the game difficulty automatically adapts to the number of members of a team. The solo experience is tiring at times, but extremely satisfying and will make you feel like a true guardian.
Weave the canvas
The newcomer of this latest expansion is the canvas class which the Destiny community has chosen as one of the most fun available in our arsenal. The campaign (both normal and legend difficulty) will teach you how to use it by deepening its special abilities from mission to mission. Once the main adventure is finished, however, you will be able to start unlocking its fragments, passive modifications around which the customization of your gaming style revolves. To obtain them you will need a resource called "meditations on the dark canvas" which you can receive from some specific activities or simply by killing enemies with the new class.
The places that provide the greatest amount of meditations each week are the reputation increase with Nimbus, the character introduced in the Eclipse story and who acts as a point of reference in Neomuna, the Terminal Overload public event that you find in rotation in the three location of the city, and the Partition activity which you will have access to after finishing an exotic mission that unlocks at the end of the campaign. The two offensive pillars of this new subclass are the suspension and tissueoids: the first is an effect similar to freezing and suspends enemies, rendering them harmless for a few seconds, the second describes little beings made of dark cloth that will attack the closest enemy.
Titans and hunters are better off investing in suspension by purchasing the Thread of Mind, Thread of Wisdom, Thread of Guard and Thread of Continuity fragments, with which they can multiply the suspensions of their skills while also receiving bonuses such as the new Woven shirt, a shield that protects the entire body except the head. Sorcerers are better off investing in tissueoids as they are the only class capable of calling forth creatures not used during a fight to unleash them during the next. For them the best fragments are the Thread of Finality, the Thread of Rebirth, the Thread of Evolution and the Thread of Propagation.
Endless exotic quests
If the campaign leaves a little to be desired on a narrative level, the same cannot be said of the exotic missions which become available at the end of the main adventure. Not one but four exotic weapons await you at the end of as many stories that delve even further into the background of the events of the campaign and shed light on Neomuna's past. To optimize those steps that require a lot of time spent between the activities of the new destination, we recommend carrying out the "Unfinished Business" mission and the series of adventures that the Archivist of Neomuna provides you. The first has directly to do with a key event of the campaign and will give you the Deterministic Chaos vacuum heavy machine gun. The second is divided into four parts and will give you access to the Winter Bite heavy stasis exotic glaive.
When you have unlocked every fragment and every darkweb grenade thanks to the meditations we mentioned before, you can then start the "The Last Thread" quest to obtain the exotic sidearm that deals darkweave damage Last Warning. Furthermore, as the main weapon of all these adventures, we recommend using the Quicksilver Storm exotic automatic rifle so that while you complete them you will also continue the quest to unlock and activate its catalyst which transforms it into a darkweb weapon. One of the greatest joys of Destiny 2, then, are the secret missions: The Eclipse has a beautiful one that we won't spoil anything about except the starting point. Go to the European Dead Zone Gorge and keep your eyes peeled, there's something more Vex-themed that's worth investigating.
How to level up fast
The other goal that everyone sets at the beginning of each new expansion is level up quickly to be able to face the multifaceted endgame of Destiny 2. To start off on the right foot, we recommend tackling the campaign on Legend difficulty. If you manage to beat her you will receive an entire set of equipment at level 1770: with 10 more levels you can already tackle the raid while at 1800 you will be able to bring home the most difficult contents such as the secret exotic mission. To level up you will first have to complete the activities that have the wording "Powerful Armament" in the rewards, these are: completing eight bounties in the Vanguard, the Crucible (PvP) and Gambit, earning reputation with Nimbus by completing events on Neomuna and gain reputation with the Archivist of Neomuna by defeating enemies in the Terminal Overload public event.
All these activities will take you up to level 1800, no further, to get to the maximum allowed by this season of 1810 you will have to start doing the activities that give "Peak Armament". Raids, dungeons but also assaults from the Nightfall playlist and Challenges of Eternity: follow the yellow dots on the navigation screen and pay attention to the wordings, you can't go wrong. A unwritten rule is to do the ritual playlist activities first (vanguard, crucible and gamble) because their flagship armaments guarantee a smaller level increase than those of a raid; therefore, doing them later could lead to you not progressing.
All new changes
Where there might be a lot of confusion while playing Eclipse is in the new modification management system for armor which with this expansion has been both complicated and simplified. All changes related to Warmind, Light Charge and Elemental Sources have been removed and replaced with Armor Charge, a new way of thinking about skill upgrades that revolves around Orbs of Power. Each collected sphere corresponds to an armor charge (there are modifications that affect this too) and this charge decays over time so you will have to adopt a specific play style to exploit it. Your goal, then, becomes to create synergistic equipment sets that generate and exploit these orbs because their benefits decay over time.
Let's take an example: for a focused build on grenades, you will first have to equip this trio of modifications: Firepower, Grenade Restart and Concentration Source. The first of these changes will make you generate power spheres by killing enemies with grenades, the second will give you the ability to regenerate grenade energy (therefore shortening their cooldown time) every time you use them, receiving even more if you have some armor charges and the third will greatly improve your ability to regenerate grenades by boosting the discipline statistic. In short: exploit keywords and try to balance the generation and use of power spheres.
All the modifications for reloading, ammo research and flinch resistance, then, have gone from being specific to each category of armament to being dedicated to a type of damage so no more aiming aids for pulse rifles, here are aiming aids for bow, kinetic or canvas weapons. Finally, and this made many happy, the seasonal artifact modifications (those that are unlocked by gaining experience and which disappear at the end of the season) are automatically active without having to equip them, taking up precious space on your armor.
With this guide we should have covered the basics to be able to approach the Eclipse more easily and be competitive in a short time. There's so much more we could talk about so let us know in the comments if there's something you'd like deserves further investigation or if something needs to be explained in more detail: in the meantime, keep your eyes open guardians!
