How To Farm Exotic Ciphers In ‘Destiny 2’: Only Two Bad Options

Destiny 2 has taken away one significant currency in the game for The Final Shape, and elevated the prominence of another. Legendary Shards are gone, but now Exotic Ciphers have been elevated to new prominence, and getting them is utterly exhausting.

Exotic Ciphers are now required for the first time you get new exotic armor, meaning in The Final Shape that’s six ciphers or just one piece of new armor on each class. Then you have to spend two Ascendant Shards at a time to get further rolls.

But the real issue now is that Exotic Ciphers are now required to unlock a new Artiface slot for exotics, where previously its inability to be Artifice armor felt wrong for all builds. For every piece of exotic armor you want to Artifice, it requires an Exotic Cipher on top of Masterworking it with three Ascendant Shards.

The main issue is that Bungie has not allowed for anything approaching a reasonable way to farm Exotic Ciphers, adding one new way that is also bad.

• The first way is Xur’s old quest, Xenology, which can get you one a week. But as u/solehsunreal points out, the requirements to complete that are absurd. 22 strikes or a 50% win rate on 40 crucible games or gambit matches. For one. A week.

• The second way is new, and it’s resetting Rahool’s rank but turning in or focusing engrams. But it takes a long, long time to reset his rank by just turning in exotics or Prime engrams. Focusing specific exotics takes two Ascendant Shards per focus, and even though that will boost you faster, that’s an insanely high cost to use that as a farm. And again, this is just for a single Cipher. I believe you can reset Xur’s rank too, but that takes even longer with Strange Coin bottlenecks.

I’m not even going to count the final way to get them as a “farm,” which is the now 200 rank season pass which gives three total, and two are timegated behind the new episode act system.

This is just goofy. The Rahool and Xenology grind is way too long and way too boring and that’s…it. Those are your only real options, and it’s the worst. These should be able to be farmed either in a more fun, more efficient way, or they should be able to drop as actual loot somewhere. This current system has not kept up with the relevance that Exotic Ciphers now have, and something needs to change in short order here.

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