Destiny 2's Season of the Plunder has been a rough one, as Phil explained in his article on how Bungie's current model is leading to player burnout. So I wouldn't blame anyone for having peaced out already. But with the next season starting on Tuesday, if you are planning to come back, I implore you to do this easy piece of housekeeping today: Strip the artifact mods out of all your armor, especially pieces with the extra 'artifice' slot.
Artifact mods—ie, the special mods that come from the Seasonal Artifact—have caused multiple issues in the past when they're automatically deprecated at the end of the season. Those problems have included locking out the regular version of a mod and completely deleting the extra 'artifice' slot that comes on armor looted from the Master difficulty of dungeons. That's exactly what happened to me earlier this year, and having spent an inordinate amount of time grinding for the gear, you can imagine how I felt about losing the sole reason for owning it.
Back in July, Bungie said that the issue with Artifact mods and artifice armor was proving incredibly tricky to resolve. It wrote: "We are working on a fix for this to ensure that everything registers as intended, but these little sockets are craftier than they appear. The true work comes with the next fix, which includes using a script to comb through all characters on all accounts to reinitialize specific components that make up these particular armor items, thus restoring all those lost sockets. As you can imagine, this takes time and it's a complicated road."
Five months later, my slots are still missing. So I guess we're still on that winding road. Bungie did seem to solve the issue affecting how artifact mods have behaved at subsequent seasonal handovers, but honestly, why take the chance? For true peace of mind, you should swap out all Artifact mods before Tuesday's reset time (10:00 am PST, 1:00 pm EST, 6:00 pm GMT).
Happily, there's an easy way to do it in one fell swoop.
To remove all Artifact mods, sign in to Destiny Item Manager, which is a 3rd party tool that uses Bungie's API to move and change gear. Either the app or web version will work, but in both cases you'll need to authenticate via a platform associated with your Bungie.net account. Once you're in, follow these steps:
- Look for the search bar (located top right) and type: "is:armor"
- Select the column of three dots on the right hand side of the search bar
- Select the option Strip Sockets (it has a square icon with an X in)
- Select Artifact Mod
Set that running and in a couple of minutes every Artifact mod will be removed from your gear. You are now ready, technically if perhaps not emotionally, to begin the grind again once the new, as yet still unnamed, season drops.
