Photographs appearing to show a Destiny 2 Gamestop game guide have made their way onto Reddit via NFSgaming. They are full of information about subclasses, abilities, guns, magic hats, hub zones—all the good stuff. If you're avoiding details before Destiny 2's PC launch on October 24, look away now. To protect you from accidentally reading spoilers let's break up this post with a picture of Destiny's exposition lord, Blandy McBlandface aka The Speaker.
Five strikes are listed, The Pyramidion, The Inverted Spire, Exodus Crash, The Arms Dealer and, of particular interest to anyone who read all of the Hive lore in Destiny 1, Savathun's Song. That's one fewer than the six that Destiny shipped with, but if they match up to Inverted Spire, they should all be better.
The tower is back! Is it the same tower that gets blown up at the start of the game, or have the Guardians recovered one of the other abandoned towers near the city? Either way, this suggests that Destiny 2's story finishes with a return to the status quo for the Guardians. The tower features vendors and scannable spots that are likely to unlock lore snippets.
Not a huge surprise, but the nightstalker hunter subclass has been spotted. It can apparently be unlocked after you've found an artifact and completed the mission it spawns. In Destiny 2 subclasses have 'upper path' and 'lower path' skill sets. nightstalker lets hunters summon a bow and arrow made of void energy that can entangle enemies and set them up to be nuked. The lower path lets you fire multiple arrows for massive, which ought to give the nightstalker more solo utility. In Destiny 1 you could tailor the jump, grenade and super abilities in each subclass independently. It looks like Destiny 2 will give us more prescribed roles.
Destiny's travelling salesman, Xur, will return in Destiny 2. He will appear in public sectors on one of the four worlds (so he'll be harder to find than D1) and sell you exotics for legendary shards. His schedule isn't described but surely he will appear on weekends as he did in the first game.
Now, onto the guns. Surprisingly a few Destiny 1 exotics will also drop in the sequel, including Hard Light, a comically exotic bad auto rifle with a demented rate of fire and bouncing bullets. The Destiny 2 incarnation has a trait that lets you switch between arc, solar, and void damage types, so maybe it will be useful this time. Maybe.
There's no mention of Gjallahorn—Destiny 1's famously powerful rocket launcher—but we may have seen the Destiny 2 equivalent. The Wardcliff Coil is a bizarre launcher shaped like a big metal microphone. It shoots "a volley of rockets" with "an especially explosive payload." It's slow to reload but it reloads automatically when you walk over ammo and can take an extended mag to fire longer volleys. This sounds insanely good.
There's also a relatively dull pulse rifle called Vigilance Wing which gives you health regeneration and a speed boost when your friends die nearby. It gets even better if all your friends in the fireteam are dead.
Some Destiny 1 armour pieces are returning too, including the Skull of Dire Ahamkara, which again buffs the warlock's nova bomb attack. Destiny 1 players will also recognise the Crest of Alpha Lupi, Lucky Raspberry, the Insurmountable Skullfort and the Dunemarcher leg armour for Titans. If I end up rolling around with Hard Light and Dire Ahamkara I am going to suffer some serious D1 de ja vu.
I'd have preferred a clean break with the first game and a wide selection of new exotics, but at least they will be novel to new players. Plus, there are probably more exotics to be revealed—Bungie cleverly hid a few in missions in Destiny 1. No doubt the internet will have it all figured out by the end of next week when Destiny 2 hits consoles.
Until then you can find the leaked exotic descriptions here. Also, check out this massive fish ship players found in the Destiny 2 beta. Given that the raid is called 'Leviathan', I expect to be going inside that thing with a fire team at some point.
