In a blog post titled Reflecting on Lightfall: Launch and Beyond, Bungie revealed that Exotic Armor Focusing is making its way to Destiny 2 next season. This is alongside a myriad of other changes and adjustments coming to the live service loot-shooter in Season of the Deep.
The article, which is available on bungie.net, discussed the reception and feedback surrounding the recent Lightfall Expansion. They touched on several aspects of the game and the feedback they received. We also got some new insights into why certain things played out the way they did: one such example is that Neomuna was purposely tuned to be more dangerous due to it being a city under siege, with Neomuna’s patrol difficulty being a hot talking point in the community over the last few weeks.
However, possibly the most substantial and gratifying reveal was that next season, Season of the Deep, Guardians will be able to start focusing Exotic Engrams. This change will allow players to easily target farm-specific pieces of gear, helping loadout and build creation immensely.
Lightfall and Beyond
Currently, the focusing system is available to all three core playlists (Vanguard, Crucible and Gambit) as well as the Seasonal Activity. In each of these activities, you can trade in a set amount of playlist-exclusive Engrams for a guaranteed roll of a specific item. While a bit more expensive, you’re skipping the grind in favour of a material cost.
In Season 21, Rahool will be the vendor in charge of Exotic Armor Focusing. You will be able to take any Exotic Engrams you acquire from random drops or the Season Pass to him for decryption. These will no longer auto-decrypt and instead will go into your Engram inventory.
Once there, you can choose to either do two things. The first is Advanced Decryption. For 1 Ascendant Shard and 30,000 Glimmer, this will turn the engram into a random Exotic piece from a certain period in Destiny 2. One example would be the “Red War Leg Decryption” which would only include Exotic Leg Armour from the first year of Destiny 2. The other way to focus your Exotics is Precision Decryption. This allows you to choose a specific Exotic to turn the Engram into. This does cost significantly more than Advanced Description at 3 Ascendant Shards, 60,000 Glimmer and 1 Exotic Cipher.
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- Advanced Decoding
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- Precision Decoding
There are, of course, a few caveats to the system. The focusing system won’t drop any new Exotics you haven’t received before, meaning you’ll still need to play Lost Sectors or the new Vex Strike Force event to earn those. Additionally, some worry that the cost is too steep and we don’t know what kind of stat rolls these Exotics will have. However, we’ve been asking for a system like this for a long time, so seeing it in the game is a good start.
Destiny 2 Season of the Deep and the new Exotic Armor Focusing system will launch on May 23rd 2023. If you want to see what else was discussed in the article, including changes coming to Commendations and Guardian Ranks, you can find it here.
