New ‘Destiny 2’ Final Shape Exotic Armor Changes Sound Bad

I feel like sometimes Bungie changes things just for the sake of changing them in Destiny 2, and I am not loving their plans for a new way to get exotic armor starting with The Final Shape. Previously, when each new season or expansion launched, you’d head into a legend or master Lost Sector to farm some runs until it dropped as your first exotic, given the game’s knockout system. Now? It’s…more complicated, and looks to possibly extend the time it takes to get these in a not-terribly-fun way. Here’s what’s going on.

• All of this is now centered on Rahool, who will now be getting a rank-up system like almost every other vendor in the game.
• He is the only place you can get the new exotic armor as it will not drop in the wild anymore, not from Lost Sectors, not from the Vex Incursion event on Neomuna.
• You rank Rahool up by decoding engrams with him and focusing exotics. More specific and costly exotic focusing ranks you up the most, exotic and prime engram decoding gives you less.
• To gain the ability to focus the seasons/expansion’s new exotic armor, you have to do a full reset with him, which will give you the ability to buy the new exotics for an engram and an exotic cipher.
• Bungie’s advice for getting “Rahool ready” in the new season is to fill your inventory with exotic engrams, as they say a full collection will let you probably get close to maxing him for the first reset rank.

I am going to go on record to say this sounds…lame?

Yes, I do think the Lost Sector farm was imperfect, but it was at least a reason to run Lost Sectors some amount of times for a good reward once a season. Now it’s just focused world drop weapons and undecrypted exotic engrams to feed to Rahool. Preparing for a new season by just overloading your inventory with exotics is extremely dull and clunky, as if you do have a full inventory of exotic engrams, that pushed out primes. Hell, if it’s completely full, you can’t even pick up legendaries, so you always need one slot open.

I don’t know if this is “harder” than the Lost Sector method, as drop rates there could be frustrating (but they’ve gotten better lately). But it’s just exceedingly boring and I’d rather there was a more creative solution to this than doing milestones for exotic engrams or farming lost sectors or Nightfalls to simply use them as currency. Or worse, spending resources to focus exotics you don’t really even care about just to make his rank go up faster. It’s just a very weird system and I don’t like the sound of it.

So, you need as many exotic engrams as you can carry before The Final Shape. I do have to assume that this will be much easier on three characters as they’ll all feed into the same rep pool. And remember you can pull exotic engrams from your battle pass, which I often forget to do, so that’s a good chunk.

This is just…dull. Exotic armor can be really exciting and gamechanging and this just seems like the most boring way possible to get it, however long it takes.

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