As Andy wrote yesterday, Bungie now offers a boost for Destiny 2 characters looking to speed their way to 900 power—the so called soft cap, after which you start chasing powerful rewards from weekly activities. There are two things to know about this microtransaction:
- You can only buy it if you already have a character who has reached 900 power already
- It costs $20
That seems pricey. Surely it must save a whole bundle of time. Well actually, it does not. As detailed in our Destiny 2 levelling guide, the journey to 900 is itself incredibly quick and easy for your secondary characters. I just did it (hey, I'd been looking for an excuse to roll a Titan), and it took just 15 minutes. And 10 of those were playing the intro mission.
Here's what I did.
Step 1: Make a new character
Note that, because of the Seasonal Artifact's account-based power bonus, my new Titan actually starts at 759 power instead of 750. As a result, I'm not going to stop until I've hit 909 power, because I am not a cheat.
Step 2: Play the intro mission
This took me 10 minutes, but I did have to alt-tab out for a bit to mess with my screenshot settings. Look, this isn't a scientific experiment.
Step 3: Transfer your highest power guns from your main character
Armour, as you probably know, is class dependant. Guns, however, are not. Open up DIM (or just use the in-game vault), and equip your highest power guns on your new character.
And yes, my highest kinetic weapon is currently Does Not Compute. I'm not happy about it either.
Step 4: Get armour from your Collections tab
In Collections, select Armor and then the Levelling tab. This is where you'll find the real trash. Don't worry: you don't have to wear it. For our purposes it's just very cheap. Grab every piece in one of the levelling sets, from helmet to class item, and then go back to helmet and pull each piece again. You don't even need to equip them—they just need to be in your inventory. Keep pulling armour until the power level stops raising significantly enough to be worth it. It should be around the 870s mark.
Step 5a: Are you done? You might be done
Equip the highest power level armour you pulled (OK, yes, I lied, you do have to wear the bad armour). Depending on the power of your guns, this might get you over the line to 900. Boom.
Alas, it only got me to 907, which—remember that artifact bonus—is only 898 base power. And thus, for my last step...
Step 5b: Shaxx for the win
Or Zavala, I guess. Got any tokens from playing Crucible or Strikes on your other character? If so, now's the time to cash them in. Maybe you'll get weapons (bad), but maybe you'll get a couple of pieces of armour that will be higher power than your levelling set.
Boom. Properly this time.
It took me under five minutes from reaching the Tower for the first time on my Titan to reach the 900 soft cap. Given that, what exactly is the character boost doing that's worth my $20? Saving a bit of time in the menu? Lessening the hassle of me having to dismantle six bad helmets from my inventory? I'll stick with the admin, thanks Bungie.
