Destiny Early Endgame Guide

Destiny Early Endgame Guide by Reff42

So you beat the black garden. Yay story over! now it’s time for endgame.

You will be level 18 around this time, and maybe have a few pieces of armor with “light” modifier on them. “light” is your gear score, and affects your post-20 level.

Step 1– prep for 20. at 18 you can start getting what are called “marks”. These are a currency you can spend for legendary gear at the vendors around the tower.

To spend these marks, you must have a certain rank in their organization.

Bounties will rank you in Vanguard and you should do as many grey bounties and patrol missions as you can every day time allowing. At rank 2, you can buy armor, at rank 3, weapons.

You can get marks even before you can spend them, and you should start hording them. (note there is a max of 200 held at any time, and can only get 100 per week)

Marks can be gained by doing public events, or strike playlists of level 20 or higher. Refer to this video for a fast way of doing public events https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcveCWt_6Sg

By the time you get 100 vanguard marks and rank 2 vanguard you should be 20 already

Step 2– The road to 27. Once you hit 20 you can start using some of that sweet legendary gear. If you were lucky to pick any up before you hit 20 grats! If not you’ll be grinding for some.

After 2 weeks, you will have a maximum of 200 vanguard merits, legendary boots, gloves and chest each cost 65 merits. 65*3 = 195 so tuesday the following week is the earliest time you could have your 3 legendary armor pieces, but buy them as you see fit.

You will also be picking up strange coins over time, either from public events, engrams, or very rarely chests. Save these coins, they are used to buy exotics (special items above legendary that you can only wear one and wield another)

You are going to want to be on the lookout for an exotic helmet for your class. Xur is a special vendor in the tower who only appears from 9am CST friday to 9am CST sunday. He will sell guaranteed exotics for strange coins (13 per armor) and an exotic armor engram for 23 MOTES OF LIGHT.

Strange coins can be acquired by doing the weekly heroic strike. You get 3 coins per difficulty tier (22, 26, 28) so if you do the 26 version first, you will get 6 coins, and only 3 if you do the 28 that week after. Motes of light are aquired through the same methods as random strange coins, and you get them for just getting xp after 20.

Once you have your 3 pieces of legendary and an exotic helmet it’s time to farm again! Because legendary items require the materials from the planets you’ve seen around, helium, spinmetal, relic iron, etc. Check the upgrades for your items to see what you need.

Eventually you will see that your items require “ascendant shards” to level. We are going to ignore those upgrades for everything except the exotic helmet.

Once all those items are leveled and upgraded just below shards, you will reach 27! congrats!

Step 3– prayers and hopes. If you’re on reddit, you should be aware of /r/Fireteams which is an excellent resource for finding groups to run strikes, nightfall, and the raid. You should be looking for a raid group at this point. The raid gives you many legendary weapons, raid armor, and materials to upgrade them (if you’re lucky).

Know your enemy! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaClVCO_xcnvfYNfcu6PJ7Zp6UnPglxtH This is a guide to all the fights in the vault of glass, watch it before you go in.

Hopefully in the raid you netted yourself some useful weapons or really hopefully some armor. If you netted yourself some armor, level that ALL the way up. if you didn’t, it’s ok, there is always next week.

Step 4 The nightfall and other 28 content.

At this point you should have some ascendant shards lying around begging to be used. If you got raid armor, that is where you spend it, if you didn’t, you will need to upgrade your legendary equipment with shards twice to reach 28 (doesn’t matter if it’s 2 in the same piece or one in 2 different)

Now you can run the nightfall, again with a group from /r/Fireteams or just your friends who are also 28. Be careful, the nightfall is no pushover, even if you wiped the glass throne down with vex blood.

At this point you should also be doing the 28 dailies and 28 weekly (a pansy version of the nightfall) for the extra coins and materials.

Step 5– RNG take the wheel

Each week you should continue your hunt for that raid gear and do your daily bounties and missions. This will net you improvements to your weapons, and hopefully armor. once you have raid gloves, boots and chest, and upgrade them, you will be 30! Vault hard mode can be attempted at 29, but is VERY difficult, as damage will be tipped against you both ways by ~32%.

Note that weapons gained in the raid all (with one exception) have an extra damage against oracles bonus, and are great for making subsequent runs or hard mode easier on you.

TL;DR- 18-20 marks and vanguard rep

20-27 marks, vanguard rep, and planet farming

27 vault run 1, spend a few shards to hit 28

28 nightfall, dailies and weekly

28+ pray to RNGeesus.

Special addendum- if you have the time and inclination it is possible to triple your possible weekly drops. If you create 2 other characters and level them up to 20, you can pass your guns and armor between them through the vault. This allows you to have triple the chances of getting those random drops if you are willing to do triple the work in the week.