Destiny 2: Season of Arrivals Gameplay Guide

Destiny 2’s 11th Season is underway, and it has brought with it a chunk of new content for players to enjoy. While the season still has a large focus on Bounties as a part of the Gameplay Loop, there are several new things to take away from it. After you’ve gone and finished the introductory mission on Io and completed the Drifter’s brief introduction to the systems he has in place, you’re off to the races.

The Powerful Gear grind remains mostly the same. The Drifter, Banshee, Zavala, and Shaxx have their weekly drops you earn from Bounties; Crucible, Gambit, and Strikes still have weekly completion bonuses. The real secret lies within the new form of Engram and the new Public event. Occasionally, players will find Umbral Engrams while out and about. These engrams are often powerful, but cannot be decrypted by Rahool or Tyra Karn like normal engrams. These Umbral Engrams can only be decrypted in the new Cryptarch machine the Drifter has designed.

But wait! Before you go off and open up all your Umbral Engrams, you need to put them through the Prismatic Recaster. Another new item designed by the Drifter, the Prismatic Recaster can focus the rewards earned from these engrams. Right off the bat, you can focus the engrams into Gambit and Reckoning Weapons, Darkness Weapons, and Weapons from Seasons 8-10. You can further refine your Engrams by unlocking more upgrades from the Season Pass, which can focus Umbral Engrams to decrypt as one of two weapons or armor with one large stat boost.

The Prismatic Recaster can also be upgraded to further change how Umbral Engrams works, ranging from increasing the chance an unfocused engram can decrypt into an Exotic, or giving Umbral Engrams an increased chance to drop Shaders as well as weapons or armor. Unlike the Season of the Worthy bunker system, there is very little you can do wrong while upgrading it. The Prismatic Recaster will also be the source of a Weekly Pinnacle Reward Quest.

The Quest, Means to an End, starts by introducing you to Contact, the new Seasonal Public Event. Contact is very similar to Gambit. Players have to kill enemies to collect and bank Motes. Once you hit 100% on a wave, a swarm of Taken spawn, which needs to be defeated before you can continue. After hitting 100% and killing each swarm of Taken, you need to defeat a boss. Contact can also be turned into a Public event by collecting special orbs called Blooms. Blooms spawn a bit out of the way from the main event, and are guarded by enemies. If you engage with the enemies, a Champion will spawn that attempts to collect the Bloom. If you successfully defeat the Champion, you can collect the Bloom and bank it. You need to collect and bank every Bloom that spawns to turn the event to its Heroic Difficulty. If you’ve succeeded, the Boss that spawns will be the Taken Pyromaster, Taken Monstrosity, or Taken Howler.

After you complete this first step of the Means to an End quest, you need to then collect Umbral Traces. These are just items that appear while playing certain game modes. For the first week  you collected Umbral Traces from Strikes, Gambit, and Crucible Control. You collect these Umbral Traces from kills, but also from completing these activities. Once you’ve picked up enough Umbral Traces from whatever the quest requires, you have to travel to Io to complete the Interference mission. There, you need to destroy the Witness of Savathun. This requires you to travel to the Cradle on Io to fight Taken and disrupt rituals taking place. Once you successfully defeat the Witness of Savathun, Eris will give you a transmission from The Darkness.

This is, for now at least, the basic loop you need to go through for Season of Arrivals. There will likely be more elements that pop up throughout the Season, so keep an eye out for any changes!

Tyler Krasnai.
Editor, NoobFeed
Twitter