Destiny 2 Lightfall: Craftable weapons, god rolls, and how to farm patterns

Destiny 2 Lightfall introduces a bunch of new craftable weapons to Bungie’s MMO shooter, giving players some exciting additional options to grind towards. In this guide, we will talk about those guns in detail, some interesting rolls you might want to consider farming or crafting, and of course the best ways to farm for weapon patterns.

It is worth noting that Lightfall makes a bunch of welcome changes to the previously grind-heavy and needlessly opaque weapon crafting system. For Lightfall, seeing a red border around your new weapon’s icon always means that a weapon pattern can be extracted. Red borders no longer appear on random guns, and you never have to worry about blasting enemies to unlock Deepsight Resonance, which has been cut from the game entirely. The simple equation is that if the gun has a red border, you can dip into the details screen and extract the pattern immediately. Or if you don’t want to keep it, you can dismantle it to achieve the same thing. You still need five patterns per gun to unlock them for crafting, but there is much less grind and confusion in the process now. Good work, Bungie.

It is also worth noting that Lightfall’s launch also brings Season 20, aka Season of Defiance, which has six additional craftable weapons. We won’t cover those here, but they can be farmed and crafted in the usual seasonal ways.

Destiny 2 Lightfall craftable weapons

The five new weapons that can be crafted in Destiny 2 Lightfall are as follows:

• Dimensional Hypotrochoid - Stasis grenade launcher (heavy)
• Iterative Loop - Arc fusion rifle (special)
• Phyllotactic Spiral - Arc pulse rifle (special)
• Round Robin - Strand hand cannon (primary)
• Volta Bracket - Strand sniper rifle (primary)

These five new weapons all have a unique origin perk called Nanotech Tracer Rockets. “Landing multiple hits turns your next shot into a homing micro-rocket.” It does what?! Sign us up! Potentially more useful on stuff with lots of rapid-fire shots like hand cannons and pulse rifles than anything else, but a fancy little treat nonetheless.

Round Robin and Volta Bracket immediately catch the eye as they are two of the only weapons tied to the Lightfall expansion’s brand new Strand subclass. This means they are particularly strong against Strand-shielded enemies, of which there are plenty in the Shadow Legion forces attacking Neomuna.

We have also been quite taken by the fusion rifle Iterative Loop and the grenade launcher Dimensional Hypotrochoid. Iterative Loop has a Rapid-Fire Frame, which is handy in target-rich environments where that 500ms charge time makes all the difference, and Dimensional Hypotrochoid has a Compressed Waveframe, meaning that grenades detonate on impact with the ground and send out a wave of damage.

Unlike special-slot waveframe grenade launchers, which can typically fire one or two rounds before reloading, Dimensional Hypotrochoid can hold five in the magazine—and more with the right perks—which means it is brilliant for clearing rooms quickly. It may not be a great option for the heavy slot for boss DPS, depending on how the meta shifts, but it is a lot of fun to use in casual play.

Destiny 2 Lightfall weapon god rolls

At the time of writing, Lightfall is only a few days old, so it is probably a little early to be making sweeping judgements about which perks are best for these new guns. People are still getting their heads around Strand, we barely even know what kind of meta we are in yet, and even the most degenerate player is unlikely to have enough patterns to craft them.

Of course, another take would be: That’s loser talk! What are the best perks, guide goblin?!

OK OK, these are likely to be widely disputed and discredited within days by the rampant Destiny 2 community, but these are some perks we’d be happy to work with in PVE. We don’t play a ton of PVP, so if you need guidance there, your mileage will vary!

• Dimensional Hypotrochoid - Volatile Launch, High Velocity Rounds, Envious Assassin, Chain Reaction - It may be a heavy weapon, but this Compressed Waveframe grenade launcher is all about killing lots of stuff quickly. Envious Assassin overflows ammo after defeating an enemy with another gun, and Chain Reaction creates chain reactions from final blows and increases ammo reserves. The idea is to kill something with your primary/special, then switch to this and hopefully do a lot of area-of-effect slaughtering with lots of extra ammo.
• Iterative Loop - Arrowhead Brake, Accelerated Coils or Enhanced Battery (your preference), Killing Wind, Voltshot - Iterative Loop is already a Rapid-Fire Frame fusion rifle, and Killing Wind dovetails well with that to add improved handling and range to those quick shots. Folks seem to be digging Pugilist as the second perk, but we ran this on an Arc Hunter and appreciated Voltshot more in that context.
• Phyllotactic Spiral - Arrowhead Brake, Extended Mag, Under-Over, Voltshot - Useful as an everyday workhorse weapon, Phyllotactic Spiral pairs well with Arc builds and for that reason we are keen on Voltshot here too to Jolt foes.
• Round Robin - Arrowhead Brake, Ricochet Rounds, Subsistence, Golden Tricorn - Subsistence grants partial reloads when defeating enemies, and Golden Tricorn provides a damage buff on final blows, so in theory you’ll be popping foes with enhanced damage and getting ammo back as you do. Solid stuff.
• Volta Bracket - Arrowhead Brake, Accurized Rounds, Envious Assassin, Explosive Payload - We found ourselves digging out Volta Bracket to deal with long-range targets while otherwise battling stuff up close. To that end, Envious Assassin and Explosive Payload is a nice pairing, giving you extra ammo based on enemies defeated with other weapons immediately beforehand, and giving your sniper shots that little extra kick.

Destiny 2 Lightfall weapon pattern farming

The million-hour question, though, is how best to farm these delectable new crafting options. As with The Witch Queen, it is harder to gather these patterns in guaranteed ways than it would be for seasonal content, which usually has various levers you can pull at each weekly reset, but there are still a few paths you should look to tread.

• Campaign - Playing through the game, Nimbus gives you the first red border version of each of the five weapons, setting you on the path to crafted glory.
• Neomuna Reputation Rewards - Leveling up the expansion vendor, Nimbus, unlocks all sorts of extra perks (like new spawn locations!), and at Rank 30 you guarantee that every time you level up with Nimbus you will get a Lightfall weapon. So by grinding Neomuna content like patrols, public events, Lost Sectors and bounties, you should be able to rank up a bunch of times and hope for red drops among the reward packages.
• Terminal Overload - There’s a new public event in town. Terminal Overload is a multi-phase affair with bosses, plate capture, floating anchors to shoot—you name it. Like the old Escalation Protocol, you’ll want a bunch of fellow Guardians around to complete it, and at the end there is a regular reward chest and a bonus chest. The latter can be opened with a Terminal Overload key—these drop randomly and can also be obtained via a daily Nimbus bounty. Hammering Terminal Overload ought to prove a useful source of Lightfall red borders over time.

For now, that’s what we know. The likelihood is that if players struggle to obtain craftable versions of these weapons, Bungie will ease things so they are more obtainable, but that may take a while. In the meantime, you just gotta play a lot of Lightfall content!