Destiny 2's final update – live coverage of the end of an era
News, reactions, and maybe a stifled tear or two as the highly-influential FPS gets its last content update.
When does Monument of Triumph release?
[#Destiny2Game] Upcoming Maintenance: Update 9.7.0 ⚠️ Impact: Destiny 2, API, Websites TIMELINE 📅 June 9, 5–11 AM PDT (-7 UTC) 🛠 Downtime Start & End: 5:30–10 AM 🔓 Pre-Load: 9 AM 🚀 New Update and Login Available: 10 AM Full Schedule: bung.ie/d2server Install Size Info: bung.ie/motsupport
— @bungieserverstatus.bungie.net (@bungieserverstatus.bungie.net.bsky.social) 2026-06-09T16:48:18.238Z
Destiny 2 is about to go down for pre-patch maintenance. Per Bungie's support team, here's when you'll be able to get back in:
- Pre-load begins: 10 am PDT, 1 pm EDT, 6 pm BST
- Monument of Triumph is live: 11 am PDT, 2 pm EDT, 7 pm BST
That's assuming no delays or server queues, at least.
On Steam, we're looking at a 28.4 GB patch, which is appropriately chunky given everything we're expecting from the update.
Ikora's last message
Over the last few weeks, many people who worked on Destiny 2 across the years have been sharing their feelings about the game and its impending end. Here's Mara Junot, voice actor for Ikora Rey, with an apropos goodbye.
Junot had the unenviable job of replacing Gina Torres as the voice of Ikora back in 2021, and did an admirable job—nailing the character's personality and mannerisms. As a Warlock main, Ikora was always my favourite of the Vanguard. Here they deliver a pitch perfect farewell, which is making me feel a lot of things.
OK, so what's actually in the Monument of Triumph update?
Here's a rundown of some of what to expect from the patch, based on what Bungie has been teasing across the past few weeks:
- A restored director, which will once again be the main way to launch the game's activities and has been refreshed to add Kepler and the Lawless Frontier
- A heavily simplified version of the Portal, which will hopefully make it easier to jump in with friends and actually earn good rewards
- Distortions, a new modifier that will rotate between the game's destinations—offering extra challenge, empowered enemies, and unique rewards on completion
- The return of Sparrow Racing League, a race mode that was available in Destiny 1, arriving in the sequel for the first time
- The return of the Pantheon raid gauntlet, this time featuring bosses from raids that were "Vaulted" (ie, removed) from the game
- New loot for all of the Portal categories
- Refreshed loot pools for all raids, dungeons and destinations, including new armour set bonuses
- The ability to upgrade weapons to higher tiers
- More attunement options to help chase specific weapon drops
- Catalysts added to all exotic weapons that didn't previously have them
- 300 more vault space slots
- 8 more loadout slots
- The ability to choose between seven artifacts
- A rework of anti-champion mods, now making them intrinsic to weapon frames
- A new aspect for each class
- A new Stasis and Strand grenade
- An across the board buff to all primary weapons
- A massive balance pass across abilities, weapons and exotic armour
- Gambit is back
There's more too, including updates to bright dust—Destiny 2's in-game currency—and reworks to a bunch of PvP activities. You can browse through a full thread of planned updates, with links out to relevant articles, over on Destiny 2's Bluesky account.
The Guardian's last message
Here's Peter Jessop, voice of the male Guardian player character, saying goodbye.
"So long my friends," he writes in the video's description. "Some of you knew, but most of you didn't when I was playing along beside you. I forgive you for Ganking me in the Crucible."
Man! These are hitting me harder than I expected. I thought I'd made piece with the end of a series I've been playing for over a decade, but I guess not.
The final patch notes are here
We're still a few hours away from the release of 9.7.0. While you wait, how about over 17,000 words worth of patch notes?
New additions, reworks and fixes abound. It's an exhaustive list, and plenty of it is genuinely exciting. This would be a bumper patch worth showing up for even if Destiny 2 was continuing. Hopefully it does enough to place the game in a good place for those of us who still plan to play across the coming months and years. (Or at least until I've finished soloing all of the dungeons.)
A musical interlude
Peter Jessop's video below not only set the tone of the moment, but it did so backed by arguably the most iconic song from Destiny 2's original soundtrack.
It's one of many stand-out tracks from the game's history, a catalogue of work from series composers Skye Lewin, Michael Salvatori and others that adds massively to the rich texture of the game's history. So many of the game's moments that stick in my mind are, in part, because of the music that backed them. The orchestral howl of the dogs in the Leviathan's pleasure garden encounter, or the electronically ethereal chimes of The Whisper exotic mission.
Here's two that have stuck with me the most over the years:
Deep Stone Lullaby is a triumph of a thing—a sad, quiet, sparse little tune that's deployed perfectly in the Deep Stone Crypt raid. It's arguably the best raid moment in the series, and it happens during a jumping puzzle of all things.
On the other end of the adrenaline scale, Shell of What Was is a recurring motif throughout the Forsaken expansion, but one that comes to the fore at the end of the Last Wish raid. It's a big triumphant finish to one of the best raids to come out of the series—a final moment of hype that punctuates the time you kill a big wish dragon.
Sometimes Destiny 2 was a very very good videogame.
What builds are you taking into Monument of Triumph?
With new aspects, ability reworks, exotic armour buffs, and seven whole artifacts full of mods to pick from, this update is looking like a buildcrafter's dream. So what builds should you actually play?
Destiny 2's build scientists have been hard at work theorycrafting based on what Bungie has revealed of the new stuff. I'm particularly enjoying Llama's series, which offers three builds for each class that make use of the new toys on offer. It should offer a nice break from Getaway Artist Prismatic Warlock.
Titan
Warlock
Hunter
Is it weird that the end of Destiny 2 has me more excited to play than ever?
I've put over 3,000 hours into battling against the Traveler's enemies. I've braved dungeons, earned titles, and sweated my way through raids, but Destiny 2 coming to an end is actually the most I've wanted to play the game in years. The prospect of no more grind, ever-increasing power cap, or mandatory Portal feels pretty liberating. Plus, all the new weapons, abilities, reworked exotics, and long-requested quality of life changes definitely help to take the sting off. It's kind of bittersweet that the best time to pick up Destiny 2 in years coincides with its final update.
It's incredibly bittersweet that my most anticipated features this patch are tainted by Bungie's past decisions
As usual when we post about Destiny 2, one of the first comments to this live blog was about the time when Bungie removed a whole bunch of stuff from the game.
I've written about it before, but the 'Destiny Content Vault' proved to be a major misstep, alienating players who were rightly upset about stuff they'd paid for being taking away, and making it impossible for new players to experience the game in its entirety.
It's telling, then, that the two Monument of Triumph features I'm most excited for are also ones that are tainted by the shadow of the DCV.
Pantheon 2.0
The returning raid gauntlet mode will, this time, feature a selection of bosses and encounters that were previously vaulted. The concept art features Calus from Leviathan, Argos from Eater of Worlds and Gahlran from Crown of Sorrows. While there's no word yet on any Scourge of the Past encounters, I'll be disappointed if I don't get to have another argument about CAP vs ACP.
I'm looking forward to the nostalgia of tackling these bosses for the first time since they were removed with Beyond Light. But that excitement is lessened by the fact that I shouldn't have to see this as a big deal. That Bungie would remove a chunk of its endgame in the first place is absurd.
And a single encounter is a poor replacement for the pacing and vibes of a full raid—the way mechanics are teased and expanded across the encounters, or the connective tissue and atmosphere of interstitial combat and jumping puzzles. It's just not the same.
Calus is a fun fight, but it's a shadow of Leviathan as a whole; it's Royal Baths and braying dogs and the wacky gameshow obstacle course that lead into the boss fight. Without Scourge's city opener and Sparrow escape, Insurrection Prime is just a Servitor stuffed into a mech suit.
Part of me had always hoped they'd come back in their entirety one day. When the studio started adding old Destiny 1 raids, I'd assumed eventually it would be the turns of the ones that D2 lost. Now we know it'll never happen. That's a bitter pill to swallow.
Distortions
I've always liked Destiny 2's destination spaces. In some respects they're a missed opportunity—all a bit too simple and small to really sell the concept of a shared world shooter. Nevertheless they're a chill space to enjoy Destiny 2 as a satisfying FPS. A perfect canvas to grind bounties and catalyst progress while listening to a podcast.
So I really like that Monument of Triumph is giving them a bit more purpose. Distortions will rotate between a number of the game's patrol zones, making them harder and adding, we're told, surprising encounters and other interesting quirks. Colour me intrigued!
I like the idea of giving these spaces a bit more structure and purpose—an actual gameplay loop that offers players a reason to revisit these otherwise neglected spots.
But again, it's another part of the game left incomplete. We're missing numerous destinations still, from Io to Mars to the Tangled Shore—big chunks of the base game and it's first expansion. I'd love a Distortion on the Tangled Shore, just because I'd love to return to the Tangled Shore.
The end of Destiny 2 is sad not just because of what could have happened in its future, with the intriguing story Bungie was cooking up as part of the Fate saga. It's also sad because we now know that the tapestry of Destiny 2's history will forever remain incomplete.
Preloading for the patch is live
I can confirm patch 9.7.0 is now rolling out on Steam, ahead of the servers going back live in just over an hour. You may need to restart Steam if you don't see the download option.
At least the community is still making tools for Destiny 2
No discussion of the game would be complete without a nod to its many third-party community tools. If there's one thing Bungie absolutely nailed for Destiny 2, it was its extensive API that allowed for some powerful options to help manage your loot.
Destiny Item Manager, D2ArmorPicker and Light.gg have all been pinned to my bookmarks bar for years now. And even now, people are still offering up new ways to sort through the game's guts.
Announcing destiny reportSearch and filter every Destiny 2 weapon by name, perk, frame, archetype, damage type, ammo, and source. It's fast. Scroll through all 1700+ weapons at 100+fps.More updates to come. Check it out. pic.twitter.com/R9Hu0olyrZJune 9, 2026
Destiny Report lets you search through the games guns. You can filter by element, type, perks, frame, source. You can also play about with each gun's perks, checking what each does to a weapon's stat distribution.
It's not the first tool that has let you search through the database for the exact perk combo you want, but it seems significantly faster than many of the alternatives.
This patch already has more players on Steam than for the launch of the last Destiny 2 expansion
Even with the patch going live slightly earlier than expected, the Monument of Triumph update has breached 100,000 concurrents on Steam.
In comparison, Destiny 2's Renegades expansion pulled just 71,278 concurrents on its first day on Steam.
Marathon, meanwhile, has 7,870 players right now.
...And the servers are down
This is how you know this is a proper Destiny 2 launch. I tried to load into the Tower, got a Weasel error and now I'm stuck on a loading screen.
We're so back.
Chart watchers in shambles
Did enough people just try to check Destiny 2's concurrent numbers on SteamDB that they had to throttle traffic?
It's running fine now, but my chart watching was briefly interrupted by a queue due to increased demand.
For sure plenty in the community are invested in this patch's success, to prove to Sony and Bungie that Destiny as a series is worth investing in. See also the many, many calls for a Destiny 3 announcement during the major announcement conferences over the last week.
This patch already has more players on Steam than for the launch of The Edge of Fate
Over 150,000 people in-game on Steam now. That means we've passed The Edge of Fate's concurrent peak, which was 108,535 people on the Saturday following its release.
Destiny 2's biggest Steam launch was for Lightfall, with 316,750 players. I'd be surprised if we get there, but it's nice to see people showing up to show support.
Destiny 2 is also the top selling game on Steam right now
Not only are old players returning, but it seems that new players are showing up too.
Destiny 2 is currently the top selling game on Steam.
This is likely thanks the Destiny 2: The Collection bundle. It's the entire game: All expansions, all dungeons, even the 30th Anniversary Pack, all for $26/£22.
It's a frankly absurd deal, but more than that, it's an actually easy way to buy and experience Destiny 2. Previously, you had to read the runes and consult the tablets to figure out what each individual purchase would let you play. It was a nightmare, one actively off-putting to people who may have wanted to get into Destiny 2.
I've said it before: It's wild that it took the death of the game for this to happen.
A quick note for anyone hunting for the Old Lights emblem
For some reason, the in-game message tells you to look for the Old Lights emblem—earned for playing Destiny 2 during each of its expansion years—in the General tab of the emblems collection page.
You'll actually find it on the Account tab.
Here's how to earn the new exotic catalysts
As part of this final update, Bungie has created catalysts for the remaining 25 exotic weapons that previously didn't have one. (Catalysts being upgrades that add stat bumps and new functionality that can substantially alter the weapon's performance.) It has also created catalysts for the two new exotic weapons added in this patch: Turncoat, a void exotic hand cannon, available from the seasonal reward pass, and Fafnir, a void linear fusion rifle in the power slot, which can be purchased for Legendary Marks from the Tenet of Bravery statue in the central courtyard of the Tower. Check out their perks in the gallery below.
The catalysts for the older weapons have various acquisition methods. Common or garden exotics like Khvostov and Bastion will drop their catalysts randomnly from Vanguard, Crucible and Gambit ops activities. But the more rare raid and dungeon exotics, like Conditional Finality and Xenophage, will only be found in their respective activities. Which means dragging your best group of guardians together for one last ride, or braving the rollercoaster of LFG.
Content creator Aztecross has a video discussing what all the catalysts do, which I've also embedded. Spoiler: they're juiced. Riskrunner getting Chain Reaction and Anarchy getting buffs to trap duration and damage—as well as Impromptu Ammunition—are the stand outs for me.
Having played for a couple of hours, here's what I've learned...
This is Tim, taking over from Phil on liveblogging duties. First, a bit of a brain dump having spent some time with the game. Please bear in mind that as a veteran with 10,000+ hours in Destiny 2, this is both an exciting and very sad time for me...
- Being able to upgrade weapon tiers is a huge blessing: Previously, I would delete anything that wasn't tier 5. Now, if you find a lower tier weapon from one of the new loot pools, you can upgrade it all the way to tier 5 by spending mats and glimmer. It's expensive: the final upgrade cost me 20k glimmer, 3 Ascendant Alloy, and 1 Ascendant Shard—but hey, the game needed a resource sink. And the better news is that upgrading old craftable weapons from raid and dungeons is free. You won't get access to an extra row of perks, but Bungie has added new ones. For example, I just added a perk called Dimensional Shift to my old Corrective Measure machine gun. That's a weapon I've used since Destiny 1, and now it feels box fresh. I'm not crying, you are.
- Make sure you attune: Almost every major activity in the game now offers optional loot attunement. To access it, go to your inventory screen and click the box top left. There you'll find 12 sub-menus, covering everything from the new Distortions activity to Gambit, Crucible, Trials and even the reprised Sparrow Racing League. In each one you can select a weapon to attune to, which will then drop more regularly as a reward.
- Distortions offer a new reason to spend time on planets: Thanks to their baby soft difficulty, most players felt no reason to spend time patrolling on planets. Bungie tried to fix that by making players always underlevelled on Neomuna, but all it did was turn the enemies into bullet sponges that were a joyless slog to shoot. This patch forges a better path with its addition of Distortions. It's a map effect that rotates between planets on a timer, and sees the skies ripped open to deposit harder enemies and events. (Crucially: just hard enough.) Distortions has its own distinct loot pool, making it—for now, at least—worth spending time with, and solving the problem of most of the game's geometry going to waste. I've already snagged a sweet-looking Stasis support rifle called Decateur 02. Why didn't you do this years ago Bungie!
- Don't forget to grab your new abilities: The final patch adds new ability options across the classes, such as Void Warlock's vampiric Soul Siphon aspect and Void Hunter's Phantom Surge melee. In order to activate them, you'll need to visit Ikora Rey (my forever vanguard queen) in the tower. She'll charge you a couple of thousand gimmer and then you'll also need to meditate to unlock the ability so it can be slotted into your build. And if that seems over-engineered, then you must be new to Destiny 2. Everything was like this!
- There is an insane amount of gear in this update, and much of it is free: Clearly what has happened is that, with this being the last major update, Bungie has gathered up every single thing in development for several future seasons and then emptied the cupboards. The cynical among you will note that there are now 21 new exotic weapon skins in the Eververse MTX store, each costing 700 Silver ($9.99 / £7.99 each). You can however circumvent the cost via Bright Engram focusing, which can now be found at Tess Everis in the tower. Results are random, but you'll gradually be able to unlock everything. Overall, there is more gear to earn for free than we've ever seen before. Check out the four tenet statues in the Tower Courtyard and each one contains Ships, Ghosts, entire armor sets, rare shaders and more. All of which can be purchased, largely for affordable prices, using Legendary Marks which are earned for completing in-game triumphs. Collecting everything is going to take a while, even for a degenerate like me.
- Connection errors are very much still a thing: Well, it wouldn't be a Destiny 2 update without getting booted back to orbit by Anteater and Baboon errors I suppose. It's going to be interesting to see what level of technical support the game gets in the coming months (and years), given how it's hardly been bug-free at the best of times.
Get a free set of armor ornaments and other cosmetics from Bungie's site
As I mentioned earlier, there's a massive amount of gear to earn in the Monument of Triumph, but here's a complete set you don't need to earn at all. Instead, just redeem a bunch of codes via Bungie's site whilst logged into your profile. Here's the page. I'm not sure why this stuff isn't just in the game with the other new additions, maybe it missed some sort of cutoff. In any case, I'll take it. Speaking of which, I need to check what the mood is like over on r/DestinyFashion. I imagine they're losing their minds at the sheer amount of new outfit options.
ITEM | CODE |
Deadlands Titan Ornament Set | |
Deadlands Warlock Ornament Set | |
Deadlands Hunter Ornament Set | |
Field Transcriber Ghost Shell | |
Mobile Array Sparrow | |
Dynamic Equivalence Ship | |
Evergreen Destrier Sparrow | |
Hot and Cold Shader |
You can get what were supposed to be this year's Halloween outfits right now
Oh boy! My trip to r/destinyfashion found the motherlode. Tucked away in the collections database are two new sets of Halloween armor ornaments for each class. Bungie usually makes one set per year available, based on a player vote, with the other arriving later down the line. Seeing as the game has no plans for future content, I don't think any of us were expecting more spooky gear, but I guess they had already been designed. I've embedded all six helmets above to give you the vibe.
In order to unlock all of the ornaments, you'll need to gamble on Bright Engram focusing via the Store. Look for the icon marked Bright Engrams in the left-hand menu. On the second tab (click to the right, see below) you are able to focus based on the slot you're missing. It's going to take a while, especially if there are a lot of other ornaments you don't have, but at least it won't cost you a dime (unlike previous offerings).
There's a secret exotic mission in the update
WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY HID AN EXOTIC MISSION WITHIN AN EXOTIC MISSION pic.twitter.com/NWYIQ9NNtSJune 9, 2026
I'm logging back on to tell you that the community has unearthed a secret exotic mission that rewards a new kinetic fusion rifle called Cull's Shadow. The big brains over at r/raidsecrets have a guide on how to start the quest. Who knows what else lurks in the patch!
