Starting up Destiny 2’s new Renegades expansion this week, players may notice that they’re getting lower-tier loot than they ended with last expansion. I went from almost all Tier 5 loot to Tiers 2-4 in the campaign and activities. However, it is…extremely easy to fix this and get back to where you were. I did it in (checks calendar) four days.
Thankfully, you do not have to do something awful like in Edge of Fate by replaying a bunch of Mythic missions to increase the Tier of your gear from the expansion. Rather, all you have to do is max your reputation with a single faction, Cabal, Fallen or Vex, whom you pledge to and work for in the post-game.
This involves completing contracts and donating currency, and this is less daunting than it appears. Here’s what to do.
Pledge to a Faction and do the Priority Contract every day – This is a double rep contract that will appear once per reset. It gives you better loot and a bunch of faction XP. If you have multiple characters, you can triple pledge and do it on all of them daily.
Normal Contracts – There will be at least one of these for your faction every run you’re doing for 160 faction XP. There is one active for all three factions always, so you can double or even triple dip if the requirements overlap, which are sometimes as easy as using a faction loadout ability in a run. I am rank 3 in both the Vex and Fallen factions from doing this alone.
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Dark Matter Ingots – This is far and away the best, fastest way to level any faction. Sink all of your ingots into a single faction’s chest in their base. It will be 100 rep per ten ingots so 1000 per 100 ingots. I’d say at least 60% of my Faction ranking was from ingots alone. This will, of course, also get your gear from those chests (at lower tiers, but you can also get valuable shinies). The fastest way to get Ingots are three-minute invasions, particularly if you win, but you are forgoing faction XP from mission runs, plus you can run out of Deathmarks, so I’m not positive what’s the most efficient.
One last thing is that the little wheel notches make it look like there are six levels to max a faction, but it’s actually five. The tiers go up by 1000, each time, 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000 rep to max, so 15,000 total. It sounds daunting, but I’d be surprised if you couldn’t do it in a week with any amount of focusing on one faction.
Which faction? You can pick based on vibes, of course, but I went with the Cabal’s Totality Division almost solely to get the AT-ST (Behemoth) upgrades. That and Spider’s Restoration drone are easily the two best abilities in the game right now. Now I’m working on the Fallen mainly because I also think the little Pike is fun.
Now, Tier 5s are plentiful. Not as much as Portal drops (those did not change Tiers from last season for players), but it’s a lot, and you will be hunting Tier 5 shinies (which have a better origin perk) in short order.
A final note is that you need to both claim the “faction max” triumph on the season achievement page and then go talk to Spider to actually claim the upgrade. I made the mistake of not doing that and dumping a hundred ingots into a chest for no Tier 5s. Whoops.
Happy grinding!
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