With the launch of The Edge of Fate expansion, we’re introduced to yet approach to gear and levelling in Destiny 2, including Armour 3.0 and world/gear tiers. I swear it’s a yearly overhaul at this point. But boy, what a grind it is this time around, pushing us towards the Portal—a brand-new ‘main menu’ so to speak—to climb through the ranks. While it’s already caused some controversy, such as stealing the spotlight from the iconic Director screen (and sapping much of its personality), Portal does a cool trick up its sleeve: customisable modifiers.
Excluding PvP and low-level, matchmade Vanguard activities, nearly everything in the Portal has a huge suite of difficulty modifiers to tweak. You can adjust everything from the Power level to new boons and banes. Boons give you a boost, while banes either knock you down a peg or buff enemies. As primarily a solo player, Slayer, which gives the person on the Fireteam with the most kills a boost, can be cheekily used as a permanent buff. On the other hand, Chill Touch causes enemy melee attacks to slow you, and another bane makes you take damage if you stop moving for too long.
Adding these modifiers increases the overall difficulty of the activity but raises the floor in terms of your graded score, which in turn gives you more rewards. If you hit your forecasted score, you’ll even earn a bonus reward.
As always, it was only a matter of time until players found a way to optimise the grind. The answer is: always pick the Locked Loadout modifier. Locked Loadout does what it’s always done: prevent you from changing your gear mid-mission. If you’re a new Destiny player (rare), it’s nowhere near as bad as it sounds. Provided you pick a loadout that’s suited to the activity, there should really be no need to change mid-mission anyhow. Most activities—I’m tempted to say all—can be beaten with one strong build, especially if you’re with a pre-made Fireteam.
The benefit to using Locked Loadout is that it’s almost always enough to get you a juicy A-grade reward, without needing much else to boost your score, let alone another bane. Though if you do need some more banes to boost your projected score, I’d recommend Caltrops, Avalanche, and Counterfeit, since it’s easy enough to avoid their effects. Pick a good boon—like healing after using your class ability—and you’re in an even better position to grind Portal activities, earning multiple, high-level drops, including the new Bushido and Techsec armour set bonuses.