Yeah yeah, okay, Destiny 2 Festival of the Lost 2020 starts next week. There will be spooky new masks to collect and wear, endless candy and chocolate coins, and I begrudgingly have to admit that the new armour ornaments in the Eververse Store look pretty sweet. The Infinite Forest event is also back with a new coat of paint, from which you'll be able to earn the Braytech Werewolf and Horror Story auto rifles with new random perk rolls.
BUT WHO CARES ABOUT ANY OF THAT?
Watch the trailer above if you really want, but what actually matters for real grinders is—Oh, happy day!—the return of double Nightfall loot, which was just confirmed in today's This Week at Bungie post. Clearly the original event was a hit, because it's coming back much sooner than any of us, or our aching mice fingers, dared imagine.
As I wrote before double Nightfall loot debuted a couple of weeks ago, this represents the best loot farming opportunity Destiny has ever had in the six years since it started. Grinding the 1080 power Nightfall—or, if you're a madman with equally masochistic/skilled friends, the Grandmaster variant—will net you all the Ascendant Shards, Enhancement Prisms, and Exotic Armor you could hope for.
That surfeit of upgrade materials will leave you superbly prepared for November's Beyond Light expansion. Pro-tip: once your inventory is full, you can store the overflow of materials in each of your characters' postmasters (aim for a full stack of 10 Shards and 50 Prisms in each).
Last time around I spent most of the week in the Lake of Shadows strike, farming away like Old MacDonald having a psychotic break. The Nightfall strike scheduled for next week is A Garden World, which is the one on Mercury with the big shooty Vex orb at the end. It's quite a bit longer than Lake, but still won't pose any great problems for players with a sensible loadout on 1080 difficulty.
That said, I'm not going to lie to you: spamming the same activity ad nauseam will test the endurance of even the most committed grinder. This is the business we have chosen. My advice is to make sure you have a fireteam whose company you actually enjoy. I also found muting the in-game music and playing something soothing in my headset helpful. And of course, for those who partake, there's always booze.
Festival of the Lost, and double Nightfall drops, will run from 6 October to 3 November. Players will need to be 750 power to enter the Infinite Forest, but unless you started playing five minutes ago that shouldn't be a problem.
