Start Here

Last updated: August 7, 2025

Welcome to Destiny 2! This game is not very good at explaining itself, so this guide should hopefully cover the basic questions you’ll have starting out.

What do I need to buy if I just want to get started on my own?

Nothing to start! You can easily get 15+ hours of game out of just playing the free New Light, Shadowkeep, and Beyond Light campaigns. You’ll also have access to one Dungeon (Prophecy) and three Raids (Vault of Glass, Crota’s End, and King’s Fall), none of which require any kind of grind to access.

Beyond that, you can buy past expansions or the Legacy Bundle for access to more campaigns, Raids, Dungeons, gear, and subclasses, or buy the newest expansion or the Year of Prophecy Bundle for current content. Check out the Buyer’s Guide for more information.

I want to play with my friends. Do I need to buy something?

Depends on what your friends are doing. If they’re just grinding out Portal activities (as described in the Power level section below), you can do that with them for free, though it may be a little boring over time.

If they’re running Raids or Dungeons, some of those are free, some of those come with expansions (or the Legacy Bundle that collects all past expansions), and some require Dungeon Keys. Again, check out the Buyer’s Guide for more information.

What should I do first?

Go through the New Light campaign that you get from everyone’s favorite character, Shaw Han. It’s short and will explain at least a few useful things. If you’re a returning player from before New Light was added, you can pick it up from the “Quest Archives” on the Tower, hidden in the corner near the Postmaster - it’s fun enough that I think it’s worth doing once.

After that, Ikora will give you quests for exotic armor, and offer you a “New Light kit” including a few free exotic pieces. Pick whichever you’d like (don’t sweat it too much, everything in these kits is readily-available).

You’ll get a bunch of additional quests sending you to various places, many of which you probably don’t need to do. Feel free to look them up, but don’t worry about them too much. Definitely do not do the one that says to do Zero Hour just yet.

Your first goal out of New Light should be to unlock the rest of your Void, Solar, and Arc subclasses and their individual fragments. Blow the Glimmer you earn on this stuff as soon as you’d get it; you will be capped on Glimmer for basically your entire Destiny 2 playtime after this so don’t worry about the cost. Start getting a feel for the status effects and buildcrafting systems that Ikora’s quests poorly introduce you to (and check out the Combat Guide and Buildcrafting 101 guides).

How to get that Glimmer? Go through the free campaigns and try some Portal activities. You’ll earn a bunch just playing normally.

You’ll also notice you have a “Guardian Rank.” This is worth increasing, as it unlocks some features and, eventually, higher-tier loot in certain activities. Most of the things you do to increase this are just basic stuff you’ll do while playing the game anyways.

Okay, I did that. Now what?

One of the hardest questions in Destiny 2 to answer as a new player is, inevitably, what the hell am I supposed to be doing right now?

Your main goals are, in order of priority:

• Complete the campaigns you have access to. This will unlock subclasses, Exotic Quests, and more content. Complete Shadowkeep and Beyond Light, with the latter unlocking the Stasis subclass. Move on to Witch Queen, Lightfall (Stasis subclass), and The Final Shape (Prismatic subclass) if you have the Legacy Collection, or to Edge of Fate if you want to skip ahead to the newest campaign.
• Complete Exotic quests and missions. These quests and missions are available as part of the campaigns and post-campaign quests, as well as Pinnacle Ops in the Portal and the Legends tab of the Map screen. These are fun, unique quests that’ll get you cool gear and take you through cool places.
• Complete Raids and Dungeons. These will require forming a fireteam of 6 or 3 players respectively, but are well worth it. These are unique, challenging encounters that are the most enjoyable experiences in Destiny.
• Collect additional Exotic weapons & armor. This will involve a mixture of random drops and earning Exotic ciphers. For a complete list of Exotics, quests, and reward details, see the Exotic weapons guide and Exotic armor guide.

None of this requires you to grind your Power level. Worry about that after everything else. All of these activities will drop loot that get you up to the “soft cap” of 200 Power.

You can use the handy Content Checklist to help you keep track of what you’ve done so far. Don’t feel like you need to follow everything in linear order.

Once you’ve done or started on all of those, then you can start thinking about the endgame goal: collecting high-stat armor pieces & “god roll” weapons. This is the meat of the endgame: running activities to try to get the perfect gear.

You really are safe to ignore this until once you’ve gotten through some of the base content, but if you’re curious, read on below.

Okay, so what is that big Power number for?

The Power number does not unlock any unique content in this game, and primarily is used to unlock higher-tier gear. See the loot guide for more information on this, but a quick summary: higher-tier weapons have enhanced and selectable perks, while higher-tier armor has higher stats. Higher-tier does not mean any unique weapons/armor that isn’t available at a lower tier - all gear is available at any tier.

Crucially, Power level does not affect difficulty scaling in most content. A higher Power number will not make a Raid easier, it does not make Fabled/Mythic campaign missions easier, and it will not make any Quickplay activities in the Portal easier. It does directly correspond to difficulty in non-Quickplay Portal activities, but that’s it. Raising your Power will not make the game easier.

For a full guide on how Power works and how to increase Power, check the Power & Portal Guide.

How do I stop getting wrecked in harder content?

That’s where learning the combat system, and how to exploit that combat system through builds, comes into play. Harder content in this game is balanced around you understanding the combat and build systems, both of which this game is, of course, terrible at explaining.

Check out the Combat Guide and Buildcrafting 101 for overviews of both topics.

There’s a lot of Exotic weapons and armor, which should I get first?

The ever-shifting Destiny meta means that this is a question I don’t want to try to answer outright in this infrequently-updated document.

The Exotic weapons guide will give you a reference list of acquirable gear. Generally: anything in the world pool you will just unlock over time with drops and free Cryptarch Exotic engram decryptions, so don’t worry too much about that. Exotic missions and quests are just fun and you should do them for content, regardless of whether you wind up using the gun or not.

Your ciphers will be where you want to look up what guns to prioritize. I’d recommend looking up recent (ideally since the last expansion release) guides and videos to help you pick weapons and armor for whatever goals you have. For example, if you want to crush it in PvP, you probably want to pick up something that’s in the current Crucible meta. On the other hand, if you’re worried about your DPS in Raids, look up DPS weapons.

Armor is a little trickier since most Exotic armor is used in the context of a specific build. I would start by looking up a current build that seems interesting and unlock armor for that build. Check out Buildcrafting 101 for more information about this.

Additionally, each season has a list of Featured Exotics (visible on Collections -> Exotic screen). These get bonus damage (for weapons) and damage resistance (for armor). They’re also the only Exotics you can use in Portal missions with the Avant Garde modifier enabled. Because of this, they’re a good starter target. Generally, Featured Exotics are either new or recently-updated, which means they’re probably pretty useful in current content.

Is it just me, or does this story not make any sense?

Destiny’s storytelling has always, since day one, been really confusing. Destiny 2, however, exists in maybe one of the most hellish storytelling states of any live service game, something that makes WoW’s extended universe of books or Warframe’s decade of quest accrual seem downright approachable.

Basically: Destiny 1 launched with a barely-coherent story, which got filled in by a lot of writers writing in-game lore books and item descriptions. This got kind of cleaned up into something resembling a coherent storyline, which has been retroactively referred to as “The Light & Darkness Saga,” which basically spanned Destiny 1 all the way through The Final Shape expansion in 2024.

However, in 2020, the base Destiny 2 campaign, plus three expansion campaigns, were removed from the game due to maintenance costs and filesize problems. Compounding that, Destiny 2’s seasonal model used to involve a weekly seasonal story, which would stick around in the game only until the next expansion came out. This seasonal story began as side content but became increasingly important to the plot, to the point that the primary villain of this current expansion was introduced in a seasonal story that is no longer in the game.

Now, with the Edge of Fate, we’re supposed to be kicking off a new storyline, but it doesn’t actually do anything to help set up new players. Plus, the New Light tutorial campaign still ends with “let’s go fight The Witness,” the big bad that we defeated at the end of The Final Shape (and no, that is not a real spoiler).

So, yeah, it’s not easy to pick up and figure out. I would say: try not to feel too much FOMO; this really shouldn’t stop you from playing the game. You can peruse Youtube and Destinypedia and honestly get most of what you need. It’s still a fun universe to discover, and the best writing in the game is often standalone lore books and item descriptions.

With all that in mind, I did write a quick story intro for The Edge of Fate. I do think it seems like a more-focused saga than what we’ve had so far, just one that needs a bit of explaining to get you started.