How to prep your Guardian for Destiny: The Taken King

4) “Edge” your faction reps for immediate payouts

So here’s where we start getting into a grind that’s potentially crazy even for the hardcore Destiny player. One of the trickier things you can do before TTK is to bring your faction reputations up to where they’re almost about to level up and then leave them. Doing this across multiple factions means you can rank them up quick when TTK launches and gain brand new rewards.

Considering you can only join one faction per week, you’ll want to pick one (Future War Cult, New Monarchy, or Dead Orbit) to edge, and then edge Vanguard and Crucible in addition to that. If you manage to do all this stuff before TTK, then you have my respect, and very little reason to keep playing Destiny. Go play a weird indie game or something.

3) Max out some basic currencies and materials

Bungie has said that you’ll be making more Glimmer in TTK and getting more things to spend it on, but you may as well go into the expansion with a full wallet, right? Max out Glimmer at 25,000 and leave it alone until the 15th…or, if you play a lot of Prison of Elders, save up those Royal Amethysts for an extra 5000 glimmer. They can be obtained by completing House of Wolves story missions for the first time, or as random drops in PoE chests.

Once you’re glimmer-rich you’ll want to max out your Vanguard Marks and Crucible Marks on all your characters. These currencies are being retired in favor of Legendary Marks, but they’ll still be valuable at first. Either as part of the 2.0 patch or TTK release (Bungie hasn’t confirmed which), these marks will be converted into commendations at a conversion rate of 50 marks to one commendation. With three characters maxed out on Vanguard and Crucible marks you could conceivably gain 24 commendations at the start of TTK. Each commendation is worth 250 reputation, allowing you to rank up multiple factions for reward packages and maybe, brand new legendary gear.

2) Stock up on Motes of Light

Alright, now that I’ve scared off the non-crazy people, let’s get down to business. Going into TTK we know that Motes of Light have been a mainstay material since day one. Maybe they weren’t so useful early on, but they’ve stuck around from one expansion to the next, gaining more uses along the way.

We now know that Motes can be used to level up your weapons after the 2.0 update and TTK are released. If you’ve ever burned through all your bounties for the day and just wanted that next exotic upgrade, this could be a huge shortcut.

With Destiny’s latest expansion, The Taken King, arriving on September 15, you may be wondering what to do in the meantime. Bungie has provided a ton of info about how you’ll gear up in year 2, including bits of info about old systems, currencies, and their relevance going forward. With that info, we can start to assemble a battle plan for the time leading up to release. What should you play? What gear should you hang onto? How methodical should you get with this? To answer those questions, I’ve compiled some tips and ordered from least crazy to most.

1) Stop playing Destiny and do something else until launch

Here’s one idea: just don’t play anymore Destiny for now. If the releases of The Dark Below and House of Wolves have taught us anything, it’s that the shortcuts we can take going into each expansion are fleeting. In the end, no matter how much effort you put into grinding various things, they may not add up to a ton of relevant advantages going into The Taken King. For your sanity, and for a break to play other games (or go outside), you might just want to NOT play Destiny for a little bit.

If you’ve never played any Destiny at all, certainly don’t start now. The changes to the leveling system, including the consumable item that will bring you to level 25 automatically, ensure that the launch of TTK will be the best time to start Destiny. You’ll catch up quick, and unless your friends are jerks, they’ll probably help you along.

If you really want to keep playing, maybe consider tackling content you haven’t gotten around to yet. Soon, old raids like Vault of Glass and Crota’s End, as well as activities like Prison of Elders, will be cycled out in favor of TTK’s new endgame. If you want to experience any of these events without being aggressively overleveled for them, now would be the time. If you have an exotic bounty for one of the guns that’s coming back for Year 2, you may want to finish that while you wait. Go find all the hidden ghosts, try out Trials of Osiris, just don’t repeat the same content over and over if you can avoid it.