6 tips to get prepped for Destiny 2's The Final Shape expansion

Trying to work out what you need to do before The Final Shape arrives? Bungie has put out a lot of info over the past few weeks about tweaks to weapons and various systems that are getting retired with the new expansion. It's hard to keep track of exactly what's staying and what's going away when year seven of Destiny 2 kicks off.

Rather than trawl through every This Week in Destiny blog post, we've put together a little list of the six most important things you need to get prepped for the expansion, whether it's spending your engrams before they disappear, or unlocking craftable weapons that'll be much harder to get come release.

Focus your engrams

At the end of a season in Destiny 2, you usually have a stack of engrams waiting with Zavala, Shaxx, Banshee, The Drifter, and maybe even Saint-14 if you've been doing a cheeky bit of Trials. These all disappear when the new season starts, so you'll want to make sure you focus them into any weapons or rolls you're still looking for. Since it's also the end of the year, that means seasonal engrams in the HELM are disappearing, such as:

• Defiant Engrams at the War Table
• Deep Engrams at the Sonar Station
• Witch's Engrams at the Ritual Table
• Wish Engrams at the Spirit of Riven

Luckily, there are still a variety of uses for them. You can whack a stat mod on your ghost and go to town focusing armour, especially if you play multiple classes and want some better stat gear for one of those. You could also focus seasonal weapons for the chance at getting a red border, though that seems like a waste when you can still get multiple free red border seasonal weapons each day. 

What I instead recommend is that you focus those engrams into:

• Recovered Leviathan Weapons at the War Table: This focusing option contains four craftable weapons, consisting of the Imperial Decree Shotgun, plus a unique sword for each of the game's classes.
• Reckoning Weapon Focusing at the Sonar Station: These six weapons from the Season of the Deep aren't craftable, so any roll you want has to be gained randomly.
• Recovered Red War Weapons at the Ritual Table: These reprised guns are also going away. In-particular, you'll want to try and get a Showrunner; one of the few SMGs that rolls with the kinetic tremors perk.

If you already have everything you want from above, you can safely roll all those seasonal engrams into armour. 

Spend your legendary shards

If you're like most Destiny 2 players, you will have accumulated 1,000s of legendary shards over the years. Well, bad news; they're being removed from the game in The Final Shape, so no more exchanging them for glimmer with Rahool. If you're looking for a way to spend your surplus before the expansion starts, I'd recommend either stocking up on raid banners with Hawthorne, or if you want to be sneaky, head to the Lectern of Enchantment by Eris on the Moon, and purchase Phantasmal Fragments. Since you'll still be able to trade this resource for glimmer come The Final Shape, it's a pretty straightforward swap.

Hold onto your exotic engrams

You know that annoying system where you have to farm legend and master lost sectors over and over to get new exotics? Yeah, that's being removed from the game. With The Final Shape, Bungie is introducing a system where you'll acquire new exotics through Rahool, similar to the way you can currently focus them. First, you'll need to reset Rahool's new reputation system, and one of the best ways to gain rep will be by focusing specific exotic armour pieces with engrams. 

You'll also need an Exotic Cipher to do this, but you should be able to grab one from Xur this weekend if you don't have one already. Once you've got your exotic engram and cipher, you'll be able to gain a good chunk of rep with Rahool once The Final Shape launches.

Don't worry about vault space too much

You were likely getting ready to clear out a good portion of your vault and all those extra Brave Arsenal rolls in preparation for The Final Shape's new guns, raid weapons, and exotics. The good news is that the expansion is adding 100 slots to your vault, so you don't have to worry too much about getting rid of old guns, especially now that the power cap is being removed from all older guns.

While checking through your vault, also take a little time to appraise your range of light and darkness subclass weapons. The Final Shape's new prismatic subclass gains energy by dealing damage with both light and dark guns—and less energy through kinetic—so you'll want to keep a decent selection around.

Bank a few bounties

Though Vanguard, Crucible, and Gambit bounties are all being replaced with the Pathfinder system in The Final Shape, destination bounties are still sticking around. If you want to stockpile some bounties to complete when the expansion comes out, so you can quickly gain a load of XP for the new seasonal artifact, head to Variks on Europa, Nimbus on Neomuna, Fynch in the Throne World, Eris Morn on the Moon, Shaw Han in the Cosmodrome, or any other destination vendor. Finish some bounties for them, and then wait until The Final Shape launches to complete them.

Spend your harmonizers and unlock seasonal guns

If you're still on the hunt for red border seasonal weapons, there are few days left in which you can complete activities to get daily red borders. You can get a seasonal red border per day for the seasons of Defiance, Deep, Wish, and Witch, so you might still be able to get a few more craftable guns before the pre-launch server downtime on Monday. Also make sure you spend your remaining Deepsight Harmonizers from the season pass. 

If you're lacking some raid weapons to use them on, remember that you can open the first secret chest in The Last Wish by using the wish wall to teleport to Shuro Chi and then backtracking. You can do this across three characters, and you don't even need to have earned weapons in the raid before to get them from this chest.