You’re playing Destiny 2, it’s great! But you want to get to that endgame so you can start building load-outs that you are going to enjoy using for the foreseeable and you certainly want to be getting ready for the raid, Trials of the Nine and the nightfall strikes, plus any other content that rewards top tier rewards. So I have devised a brief guide for you guys to follow so you can efficiently and consistently level up to max power as soon as possible.
This guide is going to break down into a couple of different sections. The reason for this is that the lower level activities stop granting you power levels higher than 265. So we will need to look at things that get you to this magic number as quick as possible, while holding on to activities that can reward you with powerful gear above that threshold.
So we will start with the things that reward you with gear above 265. It is important that you hold off on these activities until you have managed to pull yourself up to 265, otherwise while it will still be an upgrade, you will exhaust this weekly guaranteed power increase on some gear that, in theory, a blue could have rolled at. Some of these go without saying, the raid won’t be accessible until next week, same as Trials of the Nine, but if you are still leveling up at that stage it would not be wise to try and earn gear that would be better saved to get increases for running endgame activities the following week. The nightfall strike is a big one, although it says the recommended power is 240, it is an activity that can drop gear all the way up to the max power level, similar to the crucible weekly quest. This is not an exhaustive list, but a good rule of thumb is to find the rewards for an activity in the director info panel and look out for which ones say “rewards powerful gear”.
That’s all well and good, but how do you get to the point where you can start doing these activities and earning this “powerful gear”? This has always been one of the most fun parts of the Destiny experience to me, dating back to when the Taken King launched in 2015. The notion of an incremental power upgrade is one thing that the developers at Bungie seem to have found their feet with since their first expansion pack.
The first one may seem obvious, but it’s worth pointing out and that is the story. These missions want you to be at a certain level and power level at any given time, so it’s a useful barometer of where you should be. Once you complete the campaign you will be moving onto the “post game”, where things like strikes, public events (mainly heroic ones), crucible; and lost sectors and regional chests, which reward tokens for various destinations will become the main source of these light level bumps. It’s fairly self explanatory, but you should attempt to complete anything that drops gear, no matter what the rarity and you should use the gear that gets you to max power level. Don’t worry about perks and mods until you reach endgame raid prep.
All of these activities have a chance of dropping engrams. The main ones you will want to look out for are the legendaries and the exotics, which should be decrypted straight away as item power levels are rolled the second the enemy spits out the engram after his untimely demise. You can then equip your new gear and push your level up, allowing you to rinse and repeat until endgame.
It is a fairly basic and simple to follow system, but the amount of people who get trigger happy and attempt all of the hard content when there is still room for small upgrades from easy missions is staggering, and it stunts the light level growth of these players.
We hope you found this guide useful. Stick around at This Gen Gaming for plenty more Destiny 2 guides, and our first impressions article, coming very soon.
