Destiny 2: The Witch Queen has added weapon crafting, a method for steadily unlocking the potential of a weapon, instead of just stashing dozens of random rolls in your vault. But how does it work, and what materials do you need to craft a weapon? Luckily, I've made this handy Destiny 2 weapon crafting guide to help you get started.
How to craft weapons in Destiny 2: The Witch Queen
To unlock weapon crafting you’ll need to complete the first mission of the new The Witch Queen campaign. With that done, you’ll find yourself in The Enclave, a new social space on Mars. Your first weapon blueprint, a Glaive called The Enigma, will be given to you for free, and a few others are dished out by quests The majority of weapons are going to be unlocked by extracting patterns, so let's take a look at how to do that.
Unlocking a weapon frame
Once you’ve built The Enigma, you’ll start encountering weapons that drop with a Deepsight Resonance weapon and a progress bar. These are Deepsight Resonance weapons, so complete the associated progress bar by using that specific weapon to kill enemies. Alternatively, you'll also get a large amount of weapon progress by simply holding the weapon in your hands when you finish any in-game activity, like a Strike or Gambit match. This means that you can easily gain some progress on weapons just by quickly switching to them before the activity ends. I recommend the new Psi-Ops Battleground activity for this, as there is a long pause between the end of the fighting and the actual mission completion screen for some high-speed inventory juggling.
Completing any weapon will allow you to extract its Resonance, gaining materials for crafting and turning it into a normal, non-Resonance weapon you can keep if you like the perks. Not all Deepsight Resonance weapons are craftable—I had a red BxR from the 30th Anniversary update drop yesterday—but if you extract the Resonance from a craftable weapon you’ll earn progress towards unlocking it.
How do you know which weapons are craftable? Well for that you need to head to the Triumphs tab of your inventory and go to the “Patterns and Catalysts” section. Here you will find a complete list of all craftable weapons along with your progress in unlocking them. In the above screenshot you can see the Sweet Sorrow auto rifle requires five completions, which is one of the more difficult weapons to unlock. Its fellow auto-rifle, Come To Pass, only requires two completions, however. Remember that once you complete the Resonance track on any weapon it just turns back into an ordinary gun, so you’ll actually need to find five separate Deepsight Resonance versions of Sweet Sorrow and then complete them in order to unlock the pattern.
What about those crafting materials?
The other effect of completing a Deepsight Resonance weapon is to extract materials used in crafting, which is why the non-craftable Resonances remain useful. Once a Resonance track has been completed you can extract the materials. This will give you some of the elements below and you will always get some Neutral Element, which is used for everything. You’ll also get a choice between two other elements that loosely correspond to the perks on the weapon you have just completed, which are used to craft the enhanced version of various perks:
- Neutral Element - Every weapon gives some of this, and every upgrade requires it.
- Adroit Element - Generally covers perks related to handling and stability.
- Energetic Element - Includes a lot of ammo and reload perks.
- Mutable Element - Tend to correspond to ability perks.
- Ruinous Element - This roughly corresponds to damage perks.
- Drowned Element - Used for as yet unrevealed raid weapon perks.
Again, this is extremely loose. For example, Enhanced Frenzy requires mutable elements despite being a damage perk. There are also two more important materials in weapon crafting:
- Resonant Alloy: This is obtained by dismantling legendary (purple) weapons. It costs a straightforward five Alloys to craft a legendary weapon, with exotics being slightly more.
- Ascendant Alloy: This is a very rare material used to unlock enhanced perks. You can buy one from Rahool a week for 400 legendary shards, get one for completing Banshee’s reward track, and they are a rare drop from Weekly campaign missions and the Master version of wellspring. Think of them as the equivalent of Ascendant Shards for Armour upgrading.
Crafting itself is pretty simple. Head to the relic at the Enclave and choose whatever barrel, magazine, perks etc you want.! You may have noticed that a lot of these perks are locked away until you increase your weapon level, so how do you do that? The same way you unlocked the weapon in the first place: killing enemies
A crafted weapon will have a progress bar, just like a Deepsight Resonance weapon, only this time it won’t stop after one completion. Every time you fill the bar you level the weapon. There doesn’t seem to be any cap on how many times you can level up a weapon, but all perks should be unlocked by level 20. Once you’ve levelled up, you can take it back to the Relic and select “reshape” to switch out the perks for the new ones you’ve unlocked.
So, what are enhanced perks?
These are similar to regular perks that have been in Destiny for some time, but with a little something extra. Sometimes that extra is a bonus to the perk’s main purpose. Enhanced Elemental Capacitor, for example, just gives higher stat bonuses than the regular version. Others add a little extra on the side, like Enhanced Headstone, which improves stability in addition to its main function of spawning a stasis crystal on a precision kill.
All of them require at least some levelling of a weapon and rare materials to craft. How much better they are varies between perks, and there are probably going to be some long weeks of number crunching among Destiny’s buildcrafting nerds to figure out which ones are worthwhile.
Wait, what is this bit on the crafting screen that says Mementos?
Mementos are a rare drop that includes some cosmetic options for a weapon. The only Memento I’m aware of in the game right now drops from Gambit and depending on the level of your weapon it will unlock a special kill tracker for Gambit enemies, a title for the weapon and a special shader that can only be used on that weapon. Perhaps future Mementos will work the same way, or perhaps they will do something different, we can’t be sure at this point.
- Where is Xur: Find Destiny 2's exotics dealer is this week.
- Destiny 2: The Witch Queen review: The best expansion yet.
