Understanding Your Loot

Last updated: August 7, 2025

This page is here to help you understand that loot you’re getting, with a crash course in gear tiers, weapon perks, and armor stats. If you’re curious about Power or how to get higher-gear tier, see the Power & Portal Guide.

Randomized loot, or “why do I have 48 copies of the same sword?”

Destiny 2’s loot system is primarily built around weapon perks and armor stats, which are randomized. That means that just because a weapon or armor piece has the same name and appearance as another, it is still different in its perks or stats respectively.

Generally, the loot grind in Destiny is not built around grinding for some weapon or armor you’ve never seen before (with the exception of Exotic weapons and armor). Most activities have some specific pool of gear they can drop, and sometimes that’s a pretty shallow pool - for example, Edge of Fate’s destination, Kepler, only has eight or so weapons; you’ll probably collect one (or more likely, many) of each by the time you finish the campaign.

But because the perks of each copy of the gun are different, the goal of the loot grind is to try to get “god rolls” (perfect sets of perks) for certain weapons, and high-stat pieces for armor.

Gear tiers, or “why do people keep complaining about those dots in the corner of the icons”?

New Legendary gear in Destiny 2 that’s been added since the release of Edge of Fate now has a tier associated with it.

Tier is not a rarity indicator - any new Legendary weapon or armor can drop at any tier. A tier provides enhanced weapon perks or armor stats that will generally make it slightly more powerful than a lower-tier version of the item. I’ll get into the specifics of this below.

Higher-tier gear comes from a few sources:

In the Portal, the “common” drop levels are Tier 2 gear starting at 200 Power, Tier 3 gear at 300 Power, Tier 4 gear at 400 Power. See the Power & Portal Guide for more information.
You have a chance of getting a +1 higher tier in the Portal if you play harder-difficulty content and get an A rank.
Fabled Kepler activities drop Tier 2 gear.
Mythic Kepler activities drop up to Tier 3 gear, and can be increased to Tier 4 or 5 by getting unlocks at the Altar of Relativity once you hit Power 350 and 450 respectively.
Completing The Desert Perpetual Raid with three Feats active will unlock a permanent +1 tier upgrade, bringing it to Tier 3.

Note that Exotic gear, new and old, does not have a tier. Exotic weapons have fixed rolls, while Exotic armor seems to have the stats of Tier 2 armor.

New Gear & Featured Gear

You’ll notice some of your gear has a little blue icon in the corner. That indicates that it’s either New Gear, which has been introduced in the current season/expansion, or a Featured Exotic, which is treated the same as New Gear.

New Gear grants you bonus damage (for weapons) and damage resistance (for armor), which you can see by hovering over your Artifact on the inventory screen.

Some Portal activities also have a modifier, Avant Garde, which only allows you to use New Gear or Featured Exotics.

Weapon perks, or “which of these seventeen impossible-to-differentiate icons do I want to have?”

Weapons don’t have “randomized stats,” but do have randomized perks, which can impact those stats. So you’ll see your guns will have all kinds of stats like Impact, Range, Stability, etc. - these all start out as being set for that gun, but then can shift based on the perks you roll and choose.

Legendary guns have four random perks: a barrel, a magazine, and what are referred to as “column three” and “column four” perks. Some guns have an additional Origin Trait in column five, but this isn’t random (though some guns may have a selectable Origin Trait). Higher tier weapons will have enhanced or selectable perks in these columns, as well:

Tier 1: Base perks.
Tier 2: Enhanced column three & column four perks.
Tier 3: Column three & four perks are now enhanced and offer two perk choices each.
Tier 4: Same as above, plus enhanced barrel & magazine perks and weapon mods.
Tier 5: Same as above, plus enhanced origin trait & additional third choice for column three & four perks.

Generally, higher tier weapons are good because (a) enhanced perks provide a slight power upgrade (how much this matters depends on the perk) and (b) having more choices makes it much easier to chase a “god roll” of a given weapon. If you desperately want a certain perk combo, having more choices increases the odds that you’ll get a gun that has both perks available.

What a “god roll” is to you may different from other players, but a good place to start in identifying theme are the websites light.gg and Destiny Item Manager. These sites allow you to connect your Bungie account and will show you which of your guns have community-recommended perks, as well as the most popular and recommended perks for different weapons.

Upgrading & masterworking wepoans

Legendary Weapons can be upgraded from the Details screen. Upgrading will increase a given stat that is shown when you hover over the upgrade box - this stat is random for each instance of a gun. Whether it’s worth upgrading will depend on the gun and the stat.

All weapons start at level 1, and upgrading is pretty cheap - a full upgrade costs 5k Glimmer + 17 Enhancement Cores. That said, it’s not a super important mechanic right now. Feel free to upgrade anything that you use a lot.

Armor stats, or “keeping seventeen copies of the same gloves, just in case I need these stats…”

The newest Destiny update with Edge of Fate introduced a new set of armor stats and a new system called Armor 3.0. The stats themselves are described in Buildcrafting 101. These stats only apply to new gear that’s been released alongside Edge of Fate - old armor is still on the “Armor 2.0” system, and is more or less deprecated. If you’re a returning player who’s been hanging on to a Vault full of old armor, feel free to get rid of it.

In Armor 3.0, armor has an archetype that determines the primary and secondary stats that it has points in, plus a random tertiary stat. You can choose an archetype to “focus” (get a higher chance of dropping) by selecting a focus in your Ghost’s third mod slot. All armor will only ever come out of the box with 3 stats - you’ll have to upgrade or apply armor mods to add other stats to it.

Armor quality is generally just how many total points does it have?, and as you go up in gear tiers (see below), armor will have more points. Tier 4 or 5 armor also has 11 points of Armor Mod energy instead of the usual 10.

The total number of stats on a given armor piece are determined by its tier:

Tier 1: 52-57 stats
Tier 2: 58-63 stats
Tier 3: 64-69 stats
Tier 4: 70-75 stats
Tier 5: 75 stats

Tier 4 and 5 armor also gains 1 additional energy point for mod slots.

Upgrading & masterworking armor

A Legendary or Exotic Armor 3.0 piece can be upgraded five times on its Details screen. Each upgrade level adds 1 point to each of the stats that weren’t in the initial roll. So if you had a piece with 30 Health, 20 Melee, and 10 Grenade, upgrading it once would set Super, Class, and Weapons to 1 point each, and upgrading it fully would set Super, Class, and Weapons to 5 points each.

These upgrades cost slightly different amounts based on their Tier. Generally, all tiers require some amount of Glimmer and Enhancement Cores (relatively cheap resources you don’t need to worry about too much), but higher tiers will require some additional, rarer resources:

Tier 2 gear requires 1 Enhancement Prism for level 5
Tier 3 gear requires 1 Prism for level 4 and 2 Prisms + 1 Ascendant Shard for level 5
Tier 4 gear requires 1 Prism for level 2, 1 Prism for level 3, 2 Prisms + 1 Shard for level 4, and 3 Prisms + 1 Shard for level 5
TODO: I don’t have any Tier 5 gear to to look at yet, feel free to write in!
Exotic gear requires 1 Prism for level 3, 2 Prisms + 1 Shard for level 4, and 2 Prisms + 2 Shards for level 5

Enhancement Prisms and Ascendant Shards are relatively rare: both drop randomly from Portal activities, and both can be found in Rewards Pass Rewards and weekly Portal/Events rewards. That said, they also have a cap of 99 and 30 respectively, if you get near that cap, start upgrading some things!

Enhancement Prisms can be bought from Rahool for 10 Enhancement Cores and 10k Glimmer (with three a week discounted to 10 Cores + 2.5k Glimmer), while Ascendant Shards can be bought from Rahool for 10 Prisms and 50k Glimmer (with three a week discounted to 10 Prisms and 10k Glimmer). I’m not sure you’ll ever have to deal with this unless you’re constantly Masterworking everything.

Generally, I wouldn’t recommend worrying about upgrading armor until you’re getting tier 3/4/5 loot. Then it’s up to you how much to invest - if you’re swimming in Prisms and Shards, go wild (they are capped to 99 and 30 respectively after all), but if not, maybe wait until you get an armor set with a high roll for its tier (see below) that you know you’re going to use for a given build.

Legacy weapons & armor

Old weapons and armor aren’t being brought forward to these new systems. Because of this, all legacy weapons and armor are considered “tierless.”

Weapons without a tier are still perfectly usable. Armor without a tier, on the other hand, is a little weird, because you’ll see that it has stats distributed across the board, instead of focused on specific stats. It’s still usable, but might leave you feeling a little underpowered. The new stats system is meant to be played with stats reaching 70 as a baseline and 100+ for the stats you really want to focus on, and you’re not gonna be able to hit that with Armor 2.0 unless you luck into a serious high-stat roll (maybe some old Raid armor with 70+ points will get you there).

You’ll encounter legacy gear as you play through legacy campaigns, Raids, & Dungeons. My recommendation would be to go ahead and dismantle the armor (don’t worry, anything in your Collections tab can be used as a cosmetic skin, so it still has some value!), but many of the weapons you pick up will still be worth taking a closer look at.

Craftable Gear (or the lack of it)

The Witch Queen expansion in 2021 introduced crafting to Destiny 2. To use this, you have to complete the first mission of the Witch Queen campaign. If I remember right, this leads to a mini crafting tutorial.

Now, the thing is, this system got overhauled multiple times, and they’ve more or less gotten rid of it entirely going forward. The tl;dr: you used to get “red border” guns as loot (with a literal red border on the icon), which you could “extract a pattern” from on their Details screen. You would need 3, 5, or 7 of the same pattern depending on the gun to unlock the pattern. You could then craft that gun at the Relic on Mars. Leveling up a gun by using it would unlock additional perks you could choose on the gun.

This system has mostly gone away because… I don’t know, I guess getting good rolls was too easy? You can probably still find red border guns from some activities (certain Raids and Dungeons, I would assume?), but yeah, mostly a thing of the past.

The one exception: Exotics. Some exotics introduced over the last few years now have a system where you unlock improved intrinsic perks and multiple catalyst options that you can use in crafting. There’s two sources of these unlocks now:

For weapons in the Exotic Rotator, repeating missions on Expert difficulties should unlock intrinsics and catalysts.
For weapons in Pinnacle Ops, completing repeated runs on Expert difficulty or higher with an A rank should unlock intrinsics and catalysts.

Note the use of the word should. This seems somewhat buggy, with some guns missing their catalysts and/or intrinsics. I’m going to try to add more information about this to the exotic weapons guide. Until then, use caution, and feel free to write in with your experiences on getting or not getting catalysts/intrinsics from these missions.

Note that if you do get these, you’ll need to complete at least the (free) first mission of The Witch Queen campaign to be able to craft them. It’ll show up on the Savathun’s Throne World map next to the Mars landing zone.