The campaign for Destiny 2’s Warmind DLC is (incredibly) short, but mostly cute. As is the case with Bungie’s lore, it starts with a very bad thing that threatens the fate of humanity and with the possible arrival of another. The good news for those of you on PC who, despite its significant teething troubles, still grappling with the divided world shooter, is that there are plenty of secrets to discover and equip once the story is published. Could you even find the secret location of the long-lost vocal cords of our guardians? No But you will find some of the coolest loot in the game, including the Sleeper Simulant linear fusion rifle and worldline zero catalyst Sword Exotics.
More is to come, with Ana Bray’s exotic scout rifle, the Polaris rifle yet to be discovered, and strong rumors that the brutal Black Spindle sniper rifle is about to return. We’ll update this page as soon as these arrive, but for now let’s start your Lonely Planet guide to Mars …
How to set the power level
Warmind’s new max power level is 380 (or 385 with gear mods), but Bungie has taken a number of steps to ensure it will take you longer to grind your way up to the cap. Even so, the process will be familiar to most of the Guardians by now. Hear the words of Destiny Wiseman Datto in the video above explaining the best gear route. Essentially the approach is to farm tokens and engrams, then complete a weekly milestone and repeat until you run out of milestones. The cycle is only moving noticeably slower. Here are some details:
Soft Cap
Add or equip normal equipment scrap and enter the manufacturer tokens until they are roughly at power level 340. This is Warmind’s “soft cap,” the max power level blue rare equipment and maker engrams attain. If you head to Mars at around 330 Power, there is a good chance you can hit nearly 340 from story missions alone. You can easily catch up on the rest with the typical Destiny 2 activity level: regular strikes, meet Ikora on the tower for some meditations, buy treasure maps of Cayde-6, or fly to a planet of your choice and attend public events – Nessus is always a top choice for its lucrative shimmer extraction. Heroic mode and frequency of event triggers. Avoid submitting milestones until you are at least 340 years old as you will need the power bump they provide to start the process all over again.
Leviathan Raid
Once you reach 340 Power, start completing your milestones. Aside from doing the Leviathan Raid and its lairs every week, from this point on you will be at the mercy of the Luminous Engram RNG. Once you hit 350, you have reached the optimal power level for Heroic Strikes, but the rarity in it drops to a maximum of 340, so it’s not technically worth the effort. However, if you are running multiple characters, you should do all of the leveling on your main character first, and then transfer your high-level weapons to the next toon for a significant increase in performance. Of course, you’ll need to get this character to level 30 to equip the weapons, but that can be done quickly via public events. Don’t start setting milestones again until your total armor is at least 345 (with mods). Additionally, there is the new Escalation Log activity on Mars as an alternate location to loot higher-level loot. See its section below for more information. Warning: it’s hard.
How to obtain and complete the “Sleeper Simulant” quest line
The Sleeper Simulant is a beloved exotic returning from the dark console days of Fate’s First. It’s a linear fusion rifle that competes for both the top power slot and the most unwieldy exotic on this side of Khepris Horn. It kicks like a rocket launcher, shooting off a devastating ray of sunshine that blushes a Hanzo head red, and thanks to its Sleeping Beauty perk, the party never stops thanks to the laser breaking and piercing. You want this gun. Houndish explains what to do in the video above. Here is a breakdown of the key parts of this relatively simple process.
How do I get the Worldline Zero Exotic Sword?
As Destiny 2’s first exotic sword, the Worldline Zero is an attractive choice for tall knife aficionados who appreciate accelerated mobility and the benefits of a third person view. Its Tesseract perk offers short forward teleport on a heavy swing, useful for cutting a swath through garbage mobs and then fading out before taking too much damage.
Nabbing the Worldline Zero is even easier than the Sleeper Simulant, and Datto rushes to the rescue again with a comprehensive video above. You have to shoot down 35 of the 45 Lost Memory fragments that are scattered around the Martian landscape. After that, you get the sword with disappointingly little fanfare. Datto’s walkthrough shows the location of each fragment. However, it is best to erase one section clockwise around the map at a time. (A good place to start is with the included Mindlab: Rasputin area on the north edge of the map.) Make sure you bring at least one weapon of each element type (or fish out your harsh light if you have one) – some fragments need to be Your matching element will be shot with – and either a scout or a sniper rifle for distant fragments that were out of range.
Oh, and if you blow up all 45 fragments, you will only get one exotic sparrow. Lame.
How the escalation log works
You only need to finish third of five ranks of Fame to receive the grand prize, and how long you can keep up a winning streak will be the determining factor in determining your sharpening time. Each win gives you 20 ranking points with a stacking bonus of five wins that sequentially adds 5 extra points to a maximum of 40. Losses subtract 10 points, and a series of losses continuously staples 5 additional points to a maximum of 30. Ascending ranks follow a roughly exponential sequence; Reaching Rank 1 starts at 200 points, Rank 2 requires 850 and Rank 3 is around 2,200 points.
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If the prospect of facing off against crack clan premades isn’t daunting enough, this Reddit post trots out a cold calculation to calculate the steep climb ahead of you. The essential thing is that you watch a whopping 440 games to earn enough points for the claymore. It’s a choppy estimate made by the Crucible’s matchmaking pool, your team’s skill and how long you can stick to a streak – you need an absolutely ridiculous 1,100 matches played if you can’t stick to one – but it’s sturdy enough start by determining your commitment to owning a piece of gear that not many other players will own. And of course a Tryhard already has one.
