Returning player FAQ

Last updated: August 25, 2025

Welcome back to Destiny 2!

I'm returning from The Final Shape. Should I buy Edge of Fate/Year of Prophecy?

Do you like this game's campaigns? If so, you will probably like Edge of Fate. It has some divisive puzzle-solving elements and the art direction is a minor step down from the last few expansions, but it's one of the better campaign destinations Bungie has worked on, with a lot of optional post-campaign content. You can probably get 10-15 hours of game out of that alone, even ignoring all the other ongoing content, and while that might not be a great deal at $40, it's not a bad deal at the sale prices EoF has been at lately (as low as $20 on some storefronts).

The Year of Prophecy, well... do you like Star Wars? Because the next expansion included in Year of Prophecy, Renegades, is going to be Star Wars-influenced, and that's kind of all we know about it so far. Otherwise, if you're not convinced, I'd just pick up EoF (especially on sale) and hold out for Renegades in December. The Buyer's Guide goes into more detail on what else is in the Year of Prophecy bundle, but tl;dr, there's not any content in it besides the two expansions - no Dungeon Keys, no paid seasonal story, etc.

I'm returning from further back in the past. How do I catch up?

If you are missing more than one old expansion, try to get the Legacy Collection (2025) on sale. It goes down to $20 or $30 pretty often. That'll get you the campaigns you missed. The Witch Queen, Lightfall, and The Final Shape are three good-to-great campaigns worth playing, and Lightfall and TFS will unlock the Strand and Prismatic subclasses, which are both important for build options.

What's going on with Power and why is everyone complaining about it?

Power level (or Light level for those returning from really far back) no longer gates any kind of content access in the game. Instead, it's used as a grind target to unlock better tiers of gear, which get you upgraded perks & stats for weapons & armor.

This system is tied into the new Portal, which replaces the old playlists that were at the top of the Destinations screen. Much like how the playlists would get you gear taking you past the "soft cap" for Power in past years of Destiny, the Portal drops gear with Seasonal Bonus Power. As the name implies, that Seasonal Bonus Power resets at the start of the next season (which is now every six months, not three).

Understandably, this has made a lot of people very angry, as it's a pretty lengthy grind to get higher-tier gear. I don't think it should prevent you from coming back and playing campaigns or anything, but you may not want to count on getting heavily back into the endgame right now. There's a lot of rebalancing happening, more old content being brought into the Portal, and a lot of legacy Raid/Dungeon/endgame content that is "worthless" in terms of loot, so if you were a big weekly Raider or Nightfall GM player, you will likely be disappointed.

The upshot: if you're a casual player, more of Destiny is accessible without a Power grind than ever before in the history of the series.

What's up with the new Armor stats?

Edge of Fate introduced Armor 3.0, where the stats are different and armor stat distribution is very different.

Basically, the goal of Armor 3.0 is to get players to create more focused builds, and part of that is that armor now only has 3 stats per piece. The stats themselves are pretty straightforward and mostly correspond to old stats, though notably, Mobility has been removed.

You only get Armor 3.0 armor from new content - the Edge of Fate campaign, its Raid, and the Portal. My recommendation is to go ahead and delete most of your Armor 2.0 armor you might have in the Vault, just because it's very hard to make builds in the Armor 3.0 system that work well with Armor 2.0 pieces that have <65 total stats (if you have like a 70+ piece it's worth holding on to, especially Exotics, which are currently capped at only 62 or so points in the new system). You'll still get a lot of Armor 2.0 gear from playing legacy content, which is annoying, but you can play a bit of Portal to get some pieces to use for a build even as you're catching up.