Super Good Advice
An unofficial guide for Bungie's Destiny 2

Rewards & weekly missions guide

Last updated: August 21, 2025

In addition to grinding for Power and better loot in the Portal (as covered by the Power & Portal Guide), Destiny has several additional important sources of rewards. These will help you build out your Exotic collection.

Rewards Pass & seasonal challenges

The Rewards Pass is what other games call a Season Pass, and what Destiny 2 used to call a Season Pass before they decided to make all their terminology as confusing as possible. This is basically a track of rewards you have a finite amount of time to collect.

Each Rewards Pass lasts half a season. To save you the trouble of looking up the roadmap calendar, for the Year of Prophecy, that means:

  • Rewards Pass 1 (active) runs from July 15, 2025 to September 9
  • Rewards Pass 2 runs from September 9 to December 2
  • Rewards Pass 3 runs from December 2 to March 3
  • Rewards Pass 4 runs from March 3 to... whenever the next expansion is, probably sometime in July 2026

Rewards for each Rewards Pass can only be earned during its respective timeframe - once the next Pass is active, the last one is no longer earnable.

There's a free and a premium version of each Rewards Pass. If you bought the Year of Prophecy bundle, you have access to all four (though, again, if you're joining late, you can't go back and complete the earlier ones). If you don't have the bundle but buy the current expansion, it will come with the currently-active Rewards Pass. If you want to buy an individual Rewards Pass, it's $10.

You earn rewards by earning XP from doing literally anything in Destiny 2. Portal activities and their daily/weekly missions (see below) are probably the most reliable source of XP. Each Rewards Pass has a set of seasonal challenges you can get to from the Rewards Pass that will offer pretty substantial XP boosts, as well, some jumping you up 3 or more levels. Note that even though these are called seasonal challenges, they reset with the next Rewards Pass, not with the season. Like I said, the terminology on all of this sucks.

Rewards Pass rewards usually include:

  • A new Exotic weapon, which is at level 1 for premium pass holders and level 70 for free players
  • An Exotic Cipher at level 50 for all players (this used to be a big deal but is much less so due to the new weekly rewards track, see below)
  • The Exotic catalyst for both the current Rewards Pass Exotic, plus catalysts for any previous Rewards/Season Pass Exotic weapons you may have, at level 90 for all players

There's also a ton of Exotic engrams, Strange Coins, random armor pieces, some rarer currencies like Bright Dust and Ascendant Shards, etc.

Would I recommend buying the premium Rewards Passes? Ehhh. The best things on the passes are the weapon and catalyst(s), and the weekly rewards make a lot of the other stuff less of a big deal. On the other hand, it's never a bad thing to get bonus currency and loot. If you find yourself playing a lot, I don't think you'd regret buying the pass, but I wouldn't go out of your way to worry about it.

Portal weekly rank

A new system that arrived with Portal Ops is the Portal's new weekly rewards track, called "weekly rank."

The Portal has daily and weekly missions that are rather simple, usually just "get a bunch of kills" and "complete Portal Ops with a B or higher." Completing these will get you a ton of progress on the Portal rewards track, and you'll probably max it out (Rank 20) in a couple days of play. It's a weirdly polite system for Bungie, and I'm a little worried they're gonna make it grindier next season, but for now, I'm a big fan!

The weekly rank track has the following important rewards:

  • An Ascendant Shard at rank 16, which is used to upgrade armor pieces (see the loot guide)
  • An Exotic cipher at rank 17, which can be used to get Exotic weapons at the Monument to Lost Light (see the Exotic weapons guide) and Exotic armor at the Cryptarch (see the Exotic armor guide)
  • An Exotic engram at rank 19
  • Armory requisition tokens at ranks 7 and 12, which are used to get armor pieces from Zavala. These tend to not be very high-rank but do have a significant Power increase over your current average, and can help you get armor pieces for specific slots to get your Best-in-Slot average up.
  • Vanguard Arsenal credit & expansions. Each week, Zavala has one gun for offer that has several preset rolls. You can only get this gun if you acquired the Vanguard Arsenal credit at rank 10 the previous week. Collecting the expansions at ranks 15 and 20 will increase Zavala's default 3 variants to 4 and 5, so you have more options for what perks you want to get.

It's a simple, pleasant system in a game bereft of them. Honestly, if you are player who wants to just play this game a few hours casually each week, this really should be your focus - it's a good way of accruing a nice Exotic collection over time.

Strange Coins & Xur

As you complete Portal activities and rank up in the Portal weekly rewards track and the Rewards Pass, you'll earn Strange Coins, a currency capped at 200. These coins can be spent at Xur, a vendor who shows up at the Tower on Friday at reset (1pm ET) and leaves on the weekly reset at Tuesday (also 1pm).

Xur sells a few different things, but the following are the most important:

  • A rotating set of six Exotic armor pieces, two per class
  • A rotating set of three Exotic weapons from the world pool
  • Two Exotic catalysts
  • One Exotic engram a weekend

It's worth buying any Exotics and catalysts you don't have, plus the engram, every week if you have the Coins.

Xur also offers the Xenology quest every week. This is a quest with a progress bar that fills up as you do Portal activities, and when you complete it, you can go back to Xur to get an Exotic Cipher.

It can be repeated every week, but has one incredibly annoying flaw: if you don't return it to Xur the same weekend you pick it up, it won't let you pick up the quest against on the weekend that you do turn it in - you have to wait until the next weekend when Xur will offer it again. It's definitely not impossible to just do it the same weekend (it seems to take around 15-20 Portal activities), but if you just pretend it's a biweekly activity then you will probably be happier.

Special events

With Edge of Fate, Bungie introduced a new event system that shows up in the Portal. So far, we've only had an Arms Week event and Solstice, but both had their own rewards tracks in the Portal that would be increased by completing daily/weekly quests for those specific events, plus slight increases for Portal activities and missions.