Destiny Patrol Mission Solo Grinding Guide

Destiny Patrol Mission Solo Grinding Guide by CitizenPM

OVERVIEW

Patrol missions are a fairly redundant and grindy part of destiny but they can help you increase your vanguard/faction rep over time. If you have full fire team you can knock them out quickly and everybody is happy. This is a guide to help optimize patrol missions if you’re trying to grind them out solo by your lonesome. Full disclose this will absolutely not get you to rank 3 lightning fast but it’s designed to help make the best use of your time if you’re grinding. There are two basic elements to patrol grinding:

1. Keep moving – You want to spend as much time on your sparrow moving at max speed as you can.

2. Keep missions cycling – You want to make sure to get optimum missions to populate the zones at the highest rate you can.

With these in mind let’s briefly go over the basics of patrolling. Patrol opens up free roam on the planets and breaks them into regions or “zones” that have 2 to 3 patrol beacons on them. You find a patrol beacon, accept the mission, and complete the mission. Lather rinse repeat and there you have the base principles. There are 5 different types of patrol mission types. Survey, Scan, Item, Kill and VIP. Each are worth 10rep points with the exception of VIP which is worth 25.

CREATING/SELECTING A CIRCUT

First you want to find a planet that you know well as in how to get from zone to zone quickly. Most people will pick The Cosmodrome on earth because of the low level enemies but if you’re farming for region elements then you might pick somewhere else (I personally bounce between Venus and Mars because I like to stock Spirit Blooms and Relic Iron).

In any event, the key is orientation and speed. On the Cosmodrome, for example, I try to avoid the Skywatch because it’s difficult to maneuver a sparrow through there and going on foot too much takes too much time. You want your circuit to be as fluid and fast as possible bouncing from zone to zone via sparrow as fast as possible. You don’t have to do the ENTIRE map but you want to hit as many zones as you can with speed.

So after you establish a good circuit and you’re able to get around which missions do you pick first in order of operation/preference? This is where it gets a little counterintuitive, because you want to pick the ones you want the LEAST FIRST. You might be thinking “how does that make sense?” but trust me, do it.

It’s the same principle as playing poker. You want to discard your bad cards FIRST before playing your good cards and raking the pot. The same principle applies here, when you get to a zone find the missions you want to do least, select them and IMMEADEATELY abandon them (there is no penalty for this). Don’t even wait until the mission is fully outlined, just get rid of it. You want to do this because you want the missions to reset to something else (hopefully more preferable) faster. The reason you do this is because if you go to a zone and there’s nothing you like then you go to the next and there’s nothing there either you leave it up to the game to reset them on its own. It will happen eventually but it takes time for it to cycle that method. You want to clear the field of the crap so you start the cycling process on your own terms as you speed from zone to zone.

After you flush the missions you don’t want from the zone you’re in (bear in mind this could be all of them) Take the mission(s) that are preferable and knock them out, then move to the next zone. If you do this right you’ll speed from zone to zone maximizing your time and productivity.

ORDER OF SELECTION

This, from my experience the best way to approach mission selection:

-Abandon/Flush

Survey Missions – Survey missions are the biggest time wasters. More often than not it will take you somewhere far from the zone you picked it up in and have you stand in an precise spot for 10 seconds. Sometimes it’s in the middle of a swarm of enemies but that’s not really the issue. It’s the travel that disqualifies this one. They are the first ones you should pick and flush.

Item Missions- This could be a point of issue for some because sometimes you just have to kill three enemies to complete and item mission but sometimes it involves hunting down a specific type then hoping they drop items to fill a percentage bar. The problem is sometimes there just aren’t enough of them in a single spawn and spawn rate can be slow depending on how many people are in the zone or just the in game rate. Other times you know of a better place to go where the spawn rate is higher but that takes you off the circuit and that takes away from time. You can risk doing them but in my opinion they take away from your speed needlessly. Better just to flush them and be done with it.

-PLAY/TAKE

Kill Missions – Kill missions are pretty self-explanatory. If it moves, shoot it. No preference, no fuss, just kill. They generally take less than a minute to do even if you have go to another area in the same zone. They’re better than Item drops because even the rare time, in which you have to leave a zone, you can just kill anything along the way to your next stop to complete them. Always play kill missions.

VIP Missions – Always take VIP missions. They give you 2.5 times as much rep as the other patrol missions and after you do 50 on a planet the natural resources will drop 2 to 1. They are the primary reason you grind on a circuit. When you flush missions THIS is they type you are hoping for in exchange.

CONTIPLATE

Scan Missions – Scan missions can be good in limited use. Unlike survey missions, scan missions targets can be indoors or on your circuit to your next zone. They also take less than a second to complete when you find the location. You just see the prompt to scan your ghost pops and it’s a done deal. Now if a zone has 3 missions and they’re all scan, you want to flush 2. And consider the direction the last one is indicating. If it’s towards the next zone on your circuit then take it with you as you might get an easy chance to complete it along the way. If it points away from your circuit or looks like it’s going to take you off course as you progress, flush it. If a zone is unfavorable like 1xSurvey 1xItem 1xScan, flush the other to first and consider the Scan last before moving on. Think of them more as a transit bonus when going to the next zone on your circuit rather than something to look for.

TO SUM IT UP

Again this will all still take time but it puts some structure to your patrolling so you don’t end up wasting doing more grinding than is necessary if you’re patrolling solo. By knowing the region and cycling through missions as outlined you should be able to ensure you are getting rep at a good rate. Stacking bounties of course helps and doing strikes is obviously superior because of the bonuses but they can take more time. But if you’re a lower level character looking to increase rep via patrol or you just want to increase rep fast in PvE, this works well. As a side bonus since you’re more often than not on the move there’s a very good chance you’ll encounter several public events while doing this. I ran a few circuits last night while farming for resources and hit almost 10 for the night so getting marks and materials was icing on the cake.