Exotic armor pieces in Destiny 2 come exclusively from Master Rahool, the Cryptarch in The Tower, as of the arrival of 2024’s The Final Shape.
Rahool has a reputation bar that resets each episode — Bungie’s updated term for seasons, which last four months and have significant updates every six weeks — and you’ll only be able to unlock your new Exotics once you’ve made your way through the Cryptarch’s loyalty program.
In this Destiny 2 guide, we’ll walk you through how to level up Rahool each episode, how to focus Exotics, and where you can get some Exotic Engrams each week.
How to focus new Exotic armor pieces from Master Rahool
Once you reach Rank 16 with Master Rahool and reset his reputation, you’ll gain access to another page of his menu: tier 3 focusing. Here, you’ll be able to focus any Exotic armor pieces in the game, including pieces you don’t own and haven’t discovered yet.
When you’re ready, hover over the new Exotic you want — be it from The Final Shape or another release that you may have missed — and spend an Exotic engram and an Exotic Cipher to get your first roll of an Exotic of your choice. As long as you have more Exotic Ciphers and Exotic engrams, you can keep doing this; Rahool doesn’t have a weekly cap for tier 3 focusing.
Here are the new Exotic armor pieces you can tier 3 focus in The Final Shape:
- Wishful Ignorance, Exotic Titan gauntlets
- Hazardous Propulsion, Exotic Titan chest
- Gifted Conviction, Exotic Hunter chest
- Balance of Power, Exotic Hunter boots
- Speaker’s Sight, Exotic Warlock helmet
- Mataiodoxia, Exotic Warlock chest
How to level up Rahool’s reputation in Destiny 2
After years of scamming Guardians in the original Destiny, Master Rahool has a new game: his “Engram Ensiders” (groan) loyalty program. While Rahool might have a cute name for it, this update essentially just gives him a reputation track that works similarly to Banshee, Shaxx, or Zavala. The big difference here is that you’ll only be able to focus new Exotics once you reach Rank 16 and reset back to Rank 1.
To reach Rank 16 as quickly as possible, you’ll just need to regularly avail yourself of Rahool’s services.
Ideally, you’ll want to start each episode or expansion with an inventory full of Exotic or Prime engrams. If you don’t, you’ll need to farm a bit or just play the game naturally until you have some engrams to turn in. If you’d like to really focus on this, keep reading this guide for info on how to easily farm Exotic engrams.
According to Bungie, you’ll need “a little more than a full stock of Exotic engrams” to cap Rahool’s reputation. That means you’ll need to tier 2 focus 10 to 12 Exotic engrams in order to gain the ability to tier 3 focus any new ones (which also costs an Exotic engram, so you’ll likely need 11 to 14 engrams to get all the new Exotics for your class each episode).
When Bungie announced this change, it revealed that certain actions increase Rahool’s reputation faster than others. Here they are, from most to least reputation:
- Precision decryption (tier 2 focusing)
- Advanced decryption (tier 1 focusing)
- Opening an Exotic engram without focusing
- Opening a Prime engram
Your best bets here are tier 2 focusing and tier 1 focusing, both of which can be expensive. Tier 2 focusing will allow you to specifically target any armor piece you already have unlocked in your collection, and it’ll cost you an Exotic engram, 60,000 Glimmer, and two Ascendant Shards. If that’s a little rich for your blood, you can do tier 1 focusing, which allows you to pick armor from a specific expansion and roll the dice on what you’ll get. This level of focusing costs an Exotic engram, 30,000 Glimmer, and 10 Enhancement Prisms.
How to get focusable Exotic engrams in Destiny 2
In order to fuel Rahool’s reputation system, you’ll need a steady stream of Exotic engrams. As of The Final Shape, there are a few different places you can get them: Lost Sectors, playlist activities, and random drops.
Master and Legend Lost Sectors — which rotate daily — will no longer give you Exotic armor pieces when you complete them. Instead, they’ll just give you Exotic engrams that you can take to Rahool. This is one of the harder ways to get Exotics, as you’ll need a decent build to make it through and the drop rates can be brutal if you’re unlucky. However, it’s also the only reliable source that’s permanently farmable. So if you notice an easy Lost Sector is active and you have a couple of hours to kill, it’s a great way to fill out your Exotic collection.
If you don’t want to grind Lost Sectors — and who could blame you — you can run playlist activities each week to get a handful of Exotic engrams. By completing a certain amount of Strikes, Gambit games, or Crucible matches, you’ll be able to earn multiple Exotic engrams per class per week. You will eventually exhaust this method, so don’t expect to spend all week playing Strikes if your main goal is Exotics.
But what if you don’t want to do ritual activities — or you’ve already collected them all for the week — and you don’t want to run Lost Sectors? Well, you can always get lucky. Exotic engrams always have a chance to randomly drop on the ground, and some of them are focusable at Rahool. Others, unfortunately, will automatically decrypt in your inventory once you pick them up.
The post How to unlock armor Exotics with Rahool reputation in Destiny 2 appeared first on Polygon.
