Destiny 2 is making Exotic armor far less painful to farm next season

The farming options available for Destiny 2 players hunting down quality rolls of Exotic armor or chasing newly added pieces have long been prone to criticism. Legend and Master Lost Sectors have remained at the core of the grind since Beyond Light launched, but Bungie is set to change that in a major way next season.

As revealed today in a blog post covering the launch of Lightfall, Bungie has announced that—starting in season 21—Rahool is going to be offering players the ability to focus Exotic Engrams directly into the armor pieces they want. His prices are steep, but it will allow players to completely sidestep the RNG of random drops in a way they’ve never been able to before.

With this significant change to the system going live, Exotic Engrams will also no longer auto-decrypt like they do now when dropping from various activities such as Lost Sectors and Nightfalls. Instead, they’ll go to your inventory and then can be decrypted at two different tiers of focusing if the player is hunting down something specific and has the funds to do so. These two tiers are Advanced Decryption and Precision Decryption.

Advanced Decryption lets you focus down into a specific entitled release such as Exotics from Red War, Shadowkeep and other Destiny 2 expansions. It has a pretty steep asking price of 30,000 Glimmer and one Ascendant Shard, but will be a manageable focusing source for most players.

Veterans will be most interested by Precision Decryption, which allows you to focus an Exotic Engram into the exact piece of Exotic armor you want. No random luck, just another chance at a better roll of the armor you’re looking for. However, it’s going to cost you 60,000 Glimmer, three Ascendant Shards and an Exotic Cipher to do so. Since players can notably only hold one Exotic Cipher at a time currently, Bungie is also raising the cap on the Exotic Cipher inventory in season 21 to five to support the new system.

“As before, you’ll still be able to decrypt them at Rahool with no focusing for free,” the team went on to explain. “Note that you can’t get new pieces of Exotic armor from focusing, so you’ll need to collect them from the Vex Strike Force event or Lost Sectors in the meantime. In the future, we are looking to move acquiring new armor to a more accessible location.”

Vex Strike Force gets mentioned there because the Neomuna-based activity is getting a lot of Exotic armor-centric love of its own in an upcoming update as well.

“We also realize we’ve placed a lot of pressure on Lost Sectors as a source of Exotic armor,” wrote Bungie. ”We agree they aren’t currently a great method for new players to acquire Exotics from Beyond Light onward until they’ve played enough, and that with the new activity level changes, they become even less welcoming to many players.”

While Lost Sectors received a buff to their Exotic armor drop rates earlier this season to try and compensate, Bungie is taking things a step further by making Vex Strike Force an additional source for players to be able to unlock new Exotic armor. And unlike the Lost Sectors, the new Exotic armor pieces that you can collect are not slot-limited on any rotation like the daily Lost Sector system is.

It’s a hefty suite of changes to how Destiny 2 approaches its Exotic armor grind, but a renovation that will undoubtedly be a welcome update for a playerbase that’s been heavily critical of the solo Lost Sector grind for so long.